Power Efficiency of Radar Signal Processing on Embedded Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)

Abstract: In recent years the use of graphics processing units for general purpose computation has been increasing. This provides a relatively cheap and easy way of optimizing computation intensive tasks. Although a lot of research has been done on this subject the power aspect of this is not very clear. This thesis treats the implementation and benchmarking of three radar signal processing algorithms for the CPU and GPU of the Jetson Tegra X2 module. The objective was to measure the power consumption and speed of the GPU versus CPU implementations. All three algorithms were most efficiently executed on the GPU both in terms of power consumption and speed. The Space Time Adaptive Processing algorithm presented the biggest speedup and the Corner Turn the smallest. It was found that the both the computation and power efficiency of the GPU implementations was lower for sufficiently small input matrices.