Real-time sonar beamforming on a Unix workstation using process networks and POSIX threads

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 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.