Spectrum Instrumentation’s signal averaging package combines its CUDA Access for Parallel Processing (SCAPP) together with the company's latest digitizer products to harness the power of any CUDA-based GPU card. SCAPP gives users the ability to port data directly to the GPU, using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) transfers, where high-speed time and frequency domain signal averaging can be performed without the length limitations typically found in other averaging products.
The averaging package targets applications with low-level signals or where signal details are buried due to noise. This includes applications such as mass spectrometry, LIDAR, radio astronomy, automation, radar, biomedicine, and sonar for starts.
According to Spectrum, its approach can average the longest waveforms while simultaneously offering flexibility. The package works with the company's fast M4i and mid-range M2p series PCIe digitizers. The M4i series features models that can sample signals at rates up to 5 GS/s with an eight-bit resolution, 500 Msamples/s with 14-bit resolution or 250 Msamples/s with 16-bit resolution. The M2p cards offer sampling rates from 20 Msamples/s to 125 Msamples/s, all with 16-bit resolution and up to eight channels per card. Since the data is ported directly to the GPU card via the RDMA process, without any intervention by the host processor, averaging can be performed on signals of almost any length.
For example, an M4i.2220-x8 digitizer can sample signals at 2.5 Gsamples/s and average them continuously without missing an event, even when the signals being averaged are several seconds in length. Similarly, an M4i.4451-x8 digitizer with 14-bit resolution can perform the same function while sampling four signals simultaneously at 450 MS/s. The digitizer cards also include flexible trigger, acquisition and readout modes, which allows them to average signals when the trigger rates are extremely high.
The Spectrum averaging package is part of the SCAPP driver package and includes the extension for RDMA that allows the direct data transfer from the Digitizer to the GPU. The package also contains a set of examples for interaction with the digitizer and a set of CUDA parallel processing examples for the basic averaging functions. All the software is based on C/C++ and can be implemented and modified with normal programming skills. The package allows RDMA transfers directly to the GPU for PCs running LINUX, or via the CPU for systems using a Windows-based operating system. For more details, visit Spectrum Instrumentation.