June 24, 2024 by Sheri Voelz

ASAP will be optimizing software for the APAR project

The ASAP team is excited to be a part of the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR) project. This project will allow scientists to further study Earth System Sciences and to better understand high-impact weather events. For the project, the team will be evaluating and improving the performance of the software used within the project in order to enable real time analysis of the data while the plane is flying through storms. This will be a challenge because the amount of data to be analyzed will be quite large coming off the four newly installed radars.

To do the optimizations, the team performs detailed performance profiles of the software in order to understand which calculations and operations take the longest to run. Once these areas are identified, they use their expertise to modify the code in order to speed up the slow calculations.

Previous work on the APAR software stack by the ASAP group resulted in the code running 100x faster than the original version of the code ( https://doi.org/10.1177/10943420221119801 ). The team is optimistic that the code can be optimized further in order to accomplish the project’s new ambitious goals.

More information about the project can be found here: https://www.eol.ucar.edu/airborne-phased-array-radar-apar-0