A Scalable Multiprocessor for Real-time Signal Processing

Introduction Multimedia applications that operate on data such as audio, video or graphical data are showing a growing need for processor power. To meet the required performance, often specialized processors and custom hardware architectures are used. Our goal was to design a scalable multiprocessor that is versatile enough to replace many of these custom solutions for applications that perform signal processing on multimedia data in real time. To achieve high overall performance, a scalable multiprocessor system requires an interconnection structure that offers high communication bandwidth. Further, to process data in real time, a suitable interconnection structure has to provide real-time or quality of service (QoS) guarantees when transmitting data. These requirements led us to the development of the Switcherland system [1, 2]. Switcherland uses a scalable interconnection structure based on switches and forms the basis of the work described here. The Switcherland

A Scalable Real-time Signal Processor for Object-oriented Data Flow Applications

We present a scalable multiprocessor for real-time signal processing. The basic building block is a node with eight processors. A switch-based network is used to interconnect multiple nodes. Arbitrary topologies are possible as demanded by applications. The network provides quality of service guarantees allowing continuous data to be exchanged at given rates and in bounded time. Rather than using DSPs we use lowcost RISC CPUs with an architecture extended by instructions to accelerate signal processing. On the resulting platform we implemented an object-oriented programming environment familiar from general-purpose systems. In correspondence to the data flow architecture of the underlying hardware, objects exchange data by method calls. Keywords: signal processing, real-time processing, data flow architecture. 1. Introduction Signal processing applications that operate on continuous data such as audio, video or graphical data typically run on specialized processors or custom hardwa..