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First Peer-to-Peer Streaming between PXIe Digitizers and GPUs

16 March 2023 – Teledyne SP Devices, a business unit of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated, demonstrated the industry’s first implementation of peer-to-peer streaming between commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) digitizers and graphics processing units (GPUs) in PXIe Systems. The demonstration employed Teledyne SP Devices ADQ7 PXIe Digitizers and RADX Technologies, Inc. (RADX) Catalyst PXIe GPUs that are based on NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.

Peer-to-Peer streaming uses Direct Memory Access (DMA) between the Digitizer and the GPU directly over the PCIe Bus without having the data pass through the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Extensions for Instrumentation (PXIe) system’s CPU or memory subsystem. This technique enhances bandwidth per channel, while simultaneously reducing latency and minimizing the overhead incurred by the PXIe System’s CPU and Memory subsystems. The net benefit of peer-to-peer streaming is significantly improved real-time signal processing performance and system scalability, which is essential for advanced multi-channel and ultra wide-band applications like Test & Measurement (T&M) and Electronic Warfare (EW) Applications. These applications also benefit from Machine learning, where the connection to a GPU is important.

“Peer-to-peer streaming to GPUs is an essential capability that Teledyne SP Devices has long supported in its PCIe digitizer products, said Paul McCormack, Teledyne SP Devices Product & Marketing Manager. “With the advent of the RADX Catalyst PXIe GPUs, we can now add this important capability to our PXIe product portfolio as well, which is essential for many aerospace, defense, automotive and other long-life-cycle test and measurement and electronic warfare applications.”

At DSEI Japan, Teledyne SP Devices demonstrated an ADQ7 2-CH, 14-bit, PXIe digitizer that is continuously sending 5 Gigasamples per second via peer-to-peer streaming to an adjacent RADX Catalyst PXIe GPU that employs an NVIDIA Quadro T600 and is continuously performing 1 Megasample Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) on the incoming stream. The PXIe system employed in the demonstration included an NI PXIe-1095 chassis and an NI PXIe-8881 embedded controller running Ubuntu Linux 20.04. The demonstration shows that the peer to peer processing already available for PCIe applications, like computers and servers, is available for more industrial applications requiring PXIe interfaces.

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