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USENIX Annual Technical Conference (NO 98), 1998
Abstract
Making Commodity PCs Fit for Signal Processing
Michael Ismert, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Commodity PCs are on the verge of being capable
of performing a variety of signal processing tasks
that previously required special purpose hardware.
Advances in the speed and width of their processors and internal buses allow these machines to manipulate data at rates that would allow their users
to interact with a diverse range of sampled media,
such as the raw RF spectrum and ultrasound. However, today's PCs lack an I/O system capable of delivering the appropriate bandwidth to these signal
processing applications. These applications demand
high continuous throughput I/O that smooths the
inter-sample jitter introduced by interrupts, I/O bus
latency, scheduling latency, etc. This paper presents
a system that provides this functionality.
Our system is composed of two tightly integrated
parts: a PCI device that provides high raw I/O bus
throughput and operating system enhancements to
manage the device and provide low overhead transfers across the boundary between kernel and user
space. The performance is excellent, providing up to
512 Mbits/sec of continuous throughput for an application. A description of both parts of the system
is given, along with performance measurements,and
a brief description of an application.
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