Facilities

The UA and UPC have different radiofrequency laboratories with measurement instrumentation for the characterization of systems and subsystems up to 110 GHz. Moreover, an anechoic chamber for the measurement of antennas in the near field that allows measurements up to 110 GHz is available. There is also an optical assembly bench which can be used to test millimetre systems up to 100 GHz, using quasi-optical techniques. 

An indoor experimental radar platform, which is able to acquire polarimetric and single-pass interferometric SAR images up to 8 GHz, using a 2 m long linear rail is available for the groups. It includes an automated rotating platform with a precision of 1 hundredth of degree for inverse SAR experiments.

The groups have access to a electronic prototyping laboratory, equipped with a maskless lithography system for ultra-precise microwave circuit fabrication. Also, a mechanical laboratory equipped with a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling machine is available.

The SUBSIDENCE-GUI software package is available for differential interferometric processing of data from commercial orbital SAR sensors: ERS, ENVISAT, RADARSAT-2, ALOS-PALSAR, TerraSAR / TanDEM-X, Sentinel 1A/B, Cosmo-Skymed and PAZ. It can also be used to pre- and post- process data, like co-registration of the dataset to the geometry of a master image, back-geocoding of ancillary data to radar geometry and geocoding of results to UTM coordinates.

The teams have access to a cloud computing service on a cluster of multi-node DELL blade servers, with an associated distributed data storage service based on the highly scalable GlusterFS system, with an interconnection network multiple with 10 gigabit Ethernet technology based computing system. 

Additionally, a HPC (High-Performance Computing) Platform is actually being mounted. It will consist of 10 servers connected at 40 Gbps. The high-computing environment will have 11 GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) with a total of 43.512 cores and a computing capacity of 138.5 Tflops, as well as 13 CPUs with 232 cores and capacity for 464 threads, 2.880 GB of RAM and 345 TB of storage capacity.

Regarding the available computing resources, there is a centralised computing and storage platform with 40 cores, 1 TB of RAM, 145 TB of storage capacity, and 4.5 TB of dedicated SSD disks for virtual machines. In addition, there is a DELL Precision workstation, model T7500 (12 cores, Intel Xeon X5690 @ 3.47 GHz, 192 GB RAM).

After less than 2 years of usage of the centralised server, the free storage space is at half capacity, and it has been demonstrated that at least a second system with similar characteristics would be required to carry out the tasks described in this proposal.

The whole project takes advantage of having access to an agricultural field of the EEABB (Barcelona School of Agri-Food and Biosystems Engineering) - UPC, which is been used as a test site. The GBSAR for the HydroSoil campaign is mounted on the roof of the campus building, centered with respect to the cultivated area (of aproximately 22 m depth and 60 m width, 25 m far from the façade).