Parallel Computing on Intensity Offset Tracking Using Synthetic Aperture Radar for Retrieval of Glacier Velocity

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations are powerful tools to monitor surface's displacement very accurately, induced by earthquake, volcano, ground subsidence, glacier movement, etc. Especially, radar interferometry (InSAR) which utilizes phase information related to distance from sensor to target, can generate displacement map in line-of-sight direction with accuracy of a few cm or mm. Due to decorrelation effect, however, degradation of coherence in the InSAR application often prohibit from construction of differential interferogram. Offset tracking method is an alternative approach to make a two-dimensional displacement map using intensity information instead of the phase. However, there is limitation in that the offset tracking requires very intensive computation power and time. In this paper, efficiency of parallel computing has been investigated using high performance computer for estimation of glacier velocity. Two TanDEM-X SAR observations which were acquired on September 15, 2013 and September 26, 2013 over the Narsap Sermia in Southwestern Greenland were collected. Atotal of 56 of 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processors(28 physical processors with hyperthreading) by operating with linux environment were utilized. The Gamma software was used for application of offset tracking by adjustment of the number of processors for the OpenMP parallel computing. The processing times of the offset tracking at the 256 by 256 pixels of window patch size at single and 56 cores are; 26,344 sec and 2,055 sec, respectively. It is impressive that the processing time could be reduced significantly about thirteen times (12.81) at the 56 cores usage. However, the parallel computing using all the processors prevent other background operations or functions. Except the offset tracking processing, optimum number of processors need to be evaluated for computing efficiency.