Unrestricted.2016-11-142011-02-192016-11-141997-12http://hdl.handle.net/2346/22581Embedded systems often must adhere to strict size, weight and power (SWAP) constraints and yet provide tremendous computational throughput. Increasing the difficulty of this challenge, there is a trend to utilize commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components in the design of such systems to reduce both total cost and time to market. Employment of COTS components also promotes standardization and permits a more generalized approach to system evaluation and design than do systems designed at the application-specific-integrated-circuit (ASIC) level. The computationally intensive application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is by nature a high-performance embedded application that lends itself to parallelization. Mercury Computer Systems' RACE multicomputer is the COTS computing platform under investigation. With the target software and hardware defined, a system performance model, in the context of SWAP, is developed based on mathematical programming. This work proposes an optimization technique using a combination of constrained nonlinear and integer programming.application/pdfengEmbedded computer systems -- TestingParallel programming (Computer science)Synthetic aperture radarSignal processing -- EvaluationSignal processing -- ResearchThesis