Hackfest1306

Hackfest June 2013 at Virginia Tech

Opening Information Session

When: Monday, June 3, 2013, 10am - 12pm

Where: ICTAS 310, Virginia Tech

Schedule:

10:00: Tom Rondeau, GNU Radio maintainer
Introduction to GNU Radio, the community, and the Hackfest

10:20: Ben Hilburn Ettus Research, LLC
Review of software radio hardware

10:40: Johnathan Corgan, Corgan Labs and co-maintainer of GNU Radio
Interfacing and contributing to the community and the project.

11:00: Philip Balister, OpenSDR and GNU Radio contributor
Developing the open source community in the university.

11:20: Martin Braun, Ph.D. candidate, KIT and GNU Radio contributor
Ben Reynwar, GNU Radio contributor
Discussing their contributions to GNU Radio and describing the new OFDM development.

11:40: Q & A

Tuesday night barbecue

A good time was had by all!

Embedded stuff

• Review slides from http://ecewp.ece.wpi.edu/wordpress/sdr-boston/files/2013/05/newsdr2013_nwest.pdf
  
• perf top ftw
  
• bitbake -c populate_sdk can produce a toolchain that compiles gnuradio cross (python, gnuradio-core, volk, gruel)
  
• Update swig nativesdk support. ACTION: Philip
  
• gcc -ffast-math on the order of 50% speed for volk benchmark. ACTION: Verify fast-math is SDR safe.
  
• Add ICE support to OpenEmbedded. Use this as a starting point: https://github.com/veter-team/veterlayer/tree/master/recipes/zeroc

FPGA Co-processor Discussion Notes

• Co-processors implementation needs to be generalized. Current idea: Shared Memory (Zynq) vs Memory Transfer (PCIe attached DSPs, GPGPU)
• Shared Memory co-processors blocks want large contiguous memory buffers to avoid virtual to physical memory translation performance hits. Want to avoid needless mem copies as co-processor DMAs directly into RAM / cache. Current scheduler needs to be looked at with these facts in mind.
• Code ACP controller in FPGA with Slave AXI-GP port and Master ACP port. Slave port receives control msgs and pointers to memory from GNU Radio. Master ACP transfers results directly into cache. Interrupt from controller to ARM core signals co-processor finished

Wrap-up

Tom: Burst modem support

Ben: internal build-tree support. Helps with Sphinx documentation and internal QA test setup

Justin: Looking into adding LiquidDSP into GNU Radio blocks. Verifying and comparing FFT and IIR

Nick: FECAPI, QTGUI and GRC updates to support FEC visualization

Jonathan and Philip: improving understanding, building, and using GNU Radio on embedded (ARM) systems.

Johnathan: Designing the new concept of 'gr-rfe' (GNU Radio's Radio Front End abstraction)

Tim: Performance monitor sees message connections. Added fading model simulation (takes a power delay profile and normalized Doppler frequency).

Martin: OFDM OTA running. Aww yeah.

Presentation on Many-Core Co-processors

By Wu Feng, Professor at Virginia Tech.

attachment:130606-VT-GNUradio_HackerFest.pdf