Re: (GSoC) Using hardware based coprocessors in GNU radio

GNU Radio
1

On Saturday, February 8, 2014, Marcus M. [email protected] wrote:

Hello,
perform acceleration by taking some workload from uP.

I believe Junaid is referring to a GSoC project to expand the
coprocessor
abilities of GNU Radio. Systems that allow coprocessor a definitely
exist,
but they aren’t widely used and efficiently using a coprocessor with GNU
Radio isn’t exactly out of the box functionality.

What you might do for such a GSoC project depends on your interests and
abilities. It’s likely that if you wanted to make accelerators the first
step would be some form of profiling to figure out candidate blocks or
functions. OTOH maybe you’ve seen in some paper or your own experience a
good candidate for coprocessor off loading.

I think there’s also interest in enabling blocks to handle their own
buffers to allow DMA, but someone else should be able to discuss that
far
better than anything I might add at the moment.

Nathan

PS- if you’re going to discuss a GSoC project please mention that so
there’s no confusion about the subject. If this isn’t about GSoC then I
apologize for modifying the subject line.

2

@marcus, yes I have gone through that last year GSOC project, that was
some
real good work for my likings. I haven’t gone through Volk link yet.
Well,
what I have observed is that the speed limitations over hardware is
primary
imposed by the software piece. But we can’t create a dedicated hardware
for
each module, so we need generalization as well and thats where general
purpose computers are good at. So definitely, there is a requirement of
careful analysis for moving modules to FPGAs, whether significant
performance improvement will be obtained or not.

@Nathan, yes I meant to refer to GSOC project as I wish to apply for
this
year. Sorry for not writing it down in the subject and causing a
confusion.
I was going through the GSOC ideas list available here (
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/GSoC) and I wish to
get
some more details what the mentor is expecting to achieve in this
project,
this summer.

Junaid

On Saturday, February 8, 2014, West, Nathan
[email protected]