Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image processing platforms have to process increasingly large datasets under and hard

real-time deadlines. Upgrading these platforms is expensive. An attractive solution to this problem is to couple high

performance, general-purpose Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) architectures such as IBM抯 Cell BE and Intel抯 Core

with software implementations of SAR algorithms. While this approach provides great flexibility, achieving the requisite

performance is difficult and time-consuming. The reason is the highly parallel nature and general complexity of modern

COTS microarchitectures.