The incoherent scatter radar (ISR) technique is a powerful remote sensing
tool for ionosphere and thermosphere dynamics in the near-Earth space
environment. Weak ISR scatter from naturally occurring Langmuir oscillations,
or plasma lines, contain high precision information on the altitude-dependent
thermal ionospheric electron density. However, analyzing this
frequency-dependent scatter over a large number of radar ranges requires large
computational power, especially when the goal is realtime analysis. General
purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) offers immense
computational speedup when compared to traditional central processing unit
(CPU) calculations for highly parallelizable tasks, and it is well suited for
ISR analysis applications. This paper extends a single graphics processing unit
(GPU) algorithmic solution in a GPGPU framework, and discusses the algorithm
developed, including GPU hardware considerations. Results indicate an
order-of-magnitude improvement over CPU analysis and suggest that GPGPU can
achieve realtime speed for plasma line applications.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, submitting to Radio Scienc