Computational Process Networks for Real-Time High-Throughput Signal and Image Processing Systems on Workstations

Mr. Gregory Allen

Applied Research Laboratories and
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin

Friday, February 9th, 3:00 PM, ENS 302

gallen@arlut.utexas.edu

Abstract

Real-time data-intensive systems such as sonar beamformers and synthetic aperture radar processors have traditionally required implementation in expensive custom hardware. Current systems use off-the-shelf programmable processors in customized configurations to reduce development cost. To reduce development cost and time further, we consider the use of workstations as the target architecture and design environment. We present a general approach for realizing real-time data-intensive systems in software on a multiprocessor workstation.

First, we present several dataflow models which are commonly used to describe systems of this nature. Second, we present Computational Process Networks, a framework for developing scalable software implementations of signal and image processing systems on workstations. This framework models the concurrency and parallelism in these systems, and guarantees determinate execution of concurrent programs regardless of the scheduling algorithm used. We employ a scheduling algorithm that always finds a bounded execution if one exists. Third, we implement the framework in C++ using lightweight real-time POSIX threads.

We use two case studies to evaluate the performance of our framework: a high-resolution 3-D sonar beamformer, and a synthetic aperture radar processor. On a Sun Ultra Enterprise workstation, the 4-GFLOP beamformer exhibits near-linear speedup using 1 to 12 processors and executes in real-time with 12 336-MHz UltraSPARC-II processors.

Biography

Gregory E. Allen recieved his B.S.E.E in 1991 and his M.S.E. in 1998 from The University of Texas at Austin. Greg is a full-time engineer at Applied Research Laboratories, working on high-frequency, high-resolution sonar systems in the Advanced Technology Laboratory. He is also a part-time Ph. D. student under the direction of Prof. Brian Evans.

Note: Research assistant positions and summer internships are available in the Sonar Development Division at ARL. Interested students, please bring your resumes. U.S. Citizenship is required. For more info, go to: http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~allen/sddJobs/StudentJob.html

A list of Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is http://anchovy.ece.utexas.edu/seminars