Full MA paper available

GNU Radio
1

As one must keep his own promises (and I promised indeed a few months
ago),
here is the link to the full MA paper

www.pellegrini-radio.it/MA

available for anyone who might be interested in trying to apply these
ideas
to SDR, especially within the typical GNURadio, GPP-based processing
paradigm.

Just two very small “release notes”

  1. MA Design is not yet a “machine task”, i.e. no MA-compiler can be
    written
    so far. Still we believe this will be possible.
    The MA design section called RTAR is indeed already algorithmic,
    while
    what we call AS, remains for the moment a
    human design task. In our opinion, by fixing algorithmic rules for
    AS,
    something like an MA-compiler could be rather
    reasonably written.

  2. Still, our current priority is not to make MA “automatic”, as this
    will
    surely be done in the future, in case MA proves to be an
    effective technique for SDR implementation.
    Our aim is instead to prove such effectiveness by showing how big
    achievable MA acceleration factors may be.
    I.e. how significantly an SDR might benefit from
    memory-implementation
    of some of its critical parts, as long as this
    can strongly increase performance (energy-efficiency) without
    causing
    “losses in system reconfigurability and generality”,
    thus preserving the most valuable peculiarity of an SDR.
    So far, we’ve boosted our implementations through MA by something
    slightly bigger than a factor 10. We obtained this with
    some months of work, and by applying the concept of “memory space
    specialization” as described within the attached
    paper, on an ultra cheap (150 € Intel Q9400) standard CPU.
    We strongly believe that:
    A. Obtained acceleration factors can still grow by further
    applying
    techniques described within the paper on ordinary
    commercial GPPs
    B. Much larger acceleration factors are available if we use
    computational back-ends being designed ad-hoc for
    memory based techniques like MA. (i.e. prioritizing memory
    access wrt pure computation)

Our research effort is currently concentrated on proving such two
concepts
to be right.
Upon success, we believe interesting possibilities could open up for SDR
as
a radio-implementation technology, eventually
leading to substantial broadening of its application spectrum.

thanks for interest to those interested :wink: ,
apologies to those that are not.
Best Regards to Everybody

vince

PS.
small repost of MA-related video demos / conference presentations, just
in
case: