I have succeeded in making my IRA application run at 25Msps, on my “poor
mans server”, which is an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
running at 3.2GHz, with 8GB of 1333MHz memory, and running Fedora 14.
When running at 25Msps bandwidth, the application
consumes about 4.5CPUs, which leaves enough headroom to do “other
stuff” as and when I need to. Coolness.
This application performs total-power radiometry, simple spectrometry,
SETI spectrometry, and Pulsar and cosmic-transient
analysis of the incoming bandwidth.
In radiometry, sensitivity is proportional to sqrt(Bandwidth *
IntegrationTime), so being able to process the maximum amount of
bandwidth really helps.
I’m currently using a WBX card, but I’ve also used it with a DBS_RX.
I’m running the USRP2+WBX in skin inside my 4U server enclosure, and
the noise levels appear (at least at 1.4GHz) to be
very modest, which is a relief!
–
Marcus L.
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium