Invited Paper for the 1998
Asilomar Conference on Signals, Signals, and Computers
Real-Time Sonar Beamforming on a Unix workstation
Using Process Networks and POSIX Threads
Gregory E. Allen (1),
Brian L. Evans (2),
and
David C. Schanbach
(2)
(1) Applied Research Laboratories,
The University of Texas at Austin,
P.O. Box 8029,
Austin, TX 78713-8029 USA
gallen@arlut.utexas.edu
(2) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Engineering Science Building,
The University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, TX 78712-1084 USA
bevans@ece.utexas.edu
Software Release
Process Networks Research at Austin
Abstract
Traditionally, expensive custom hardware has been
required to implement data-intensive sonar beamforming algorithms
in real-time. We develop a sonar beamformer in software by merging
the following recent technologies: (1) symmetric multiprocessing
on Unix workstations, (2) lightweight POSIX threads, and (3) the
Process Network model of computation. We find that it is feasible
for a 4-GFLOP digital interpolation process network beamformer to
run in real-time on a Sun workstation with 16 UltraSPARC-II
processors running at 336 MHz. The workstation beamformer
significantly reduces cost and development time over an equivalent
hardware beamformer.
The full paper is available in
PDF and
GNU-Compressed Postscript
formats.
Slides for the lecture presentation
Greg Allen's
Beamforming Web Page.
Last Updated 05/21/14.