Sunday 20 July 2014

Parallel Processing CUDA OpenGL UHD USRP2

For a bit of light relief the last few days I have been immersed in
CUDA and OpenGL programming. My initial goal is to use the
USRP2 I have to digitise a large piece of spectrum and display
it inside the window of a Qt5 application. I will be using CUDA to
do the parallel processing and OpenGL to display the results.

So far I have managed to create an OpenGL widget that displays a
window in a Qt application, grab samples using UHD, process
them using the CUDA library and write some simple kernel code.
I need to learn a bit more about using OpenGL before I go any further
as I want to display the results as a waterfall and getting CUDA to
talk to OpenGL via the GLWidget does not look too easy to do.
Getting CUDA to share buffers with OpenGL is not difficult but adding
the extra complexity of the GLWidget means I start to stray off the
beaten path.

The biggest problem has been installing the CUDA toolkit and more
especially the correct NVIDIA driver. The one that Ubuntu wants me
to install is not the right one. It has to be the latest one on the NVIDIA
website for CUDA 6.0 to work. I am using a GTX680 card for the GPUs.
I have also been looking at OpenCL but as I am using an NVIDIA card
I thought it better to use CUDA for the moment.

I bought the GTX680 a few years ago and for the same price I could get
something much more powerful now.

I notice it is not going to be long before Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is no longer
supported at which point I will have to consider upgrading. I have heard
upgrades never go smoothly so I am not looking forward to it.

I will post some more about Odroid in the next epistle.  

1 comment:

  1. Did you take a look at gr-fosphor http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/fosphor ? It's a GNU Radio block for RTSA-like spectrum visualization using GPU, so it kind of does what you need...

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