CASPERites,
I had a crazy idea the other day, and wanted to see if it's crazy enough. Hence,
I post it here.
The idea is to build a spectrometer using off-the-shelf PC hardware, with only a
custom data acquisition board. All the DSP would be done by the PC.
The NVidia Tesla GPU board is no slouch at DSP, having 512 CUDA processors
clocked at ~1GHz. It also plugs into a regular PC motherboard.
A person could make a relatively low-cost PCI Express card with a fast ADC and a
smallish FPGA with just a data path from the ADC to the PCI bus. The data would
blast into the GPU and be processed by those 512 CUDAs, resulting in output
spectra calculated in the usual way.
One would have to select a motherboard with a proper PCI Express switch that
would actually allow the data to flow at full 16x rate from the ADC board to the
GPU.
I wonder just how this approach would compare to the ROACH II, for example.
It seems that the cost would be ~4x lower and the performance within a factor of
two. It also reduces the complexity of the non-mainstream hardware, allowing
most of the budget to be spent on products with competitive sales channels.
Thoughts?
--David Forbes
Arizona Radio Observatory
Tucson, AZ
