GRCon20 - Introducing OpenCPI as an Infrastructure for GNU Radio and GNU Radio Companion

Presented by Jim Kulp at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20 Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications developed using GNU Radio are typically based on embedded heterogeneous systems with a variety of processors, FPGAs and transceivers. But the ability of a GNU Radio based SDR application to target a variety of different heterogeneous system configurations is limited and requires significant configuration-specific development work. The existing method for GNU Radio to support various hardware configurations is through specific software and toolsets that support specific vendors’ hardware. An alternative, and better solution is for GNU Radio to have an open infrastructure that supports heterogeneous processing and a breadth of hardware and toolchains in order to avoid the limitations of vendor-based hardware and tool-chain solutions. The breadth of hardware that it supports must include multiple processor architectures (e.g. general, multi-core, manycore processors, GPUs), different FPGA and FPGA toolchains, and devices such as transceivers. The infrastructure must be well suited to maximize data transfer rates within heterogeneous systems and must maintain the GNU Radio component-based workflow, including the GRC application development environment. OpenCPI is an open-source software framework for developing and executing component-based applications on heterogeneous embedded systems. The latest OpenCPI integration with GNU Radio, now provides the needed open infrastructure for supporting heterogeneous processing. This talk presents the current state of the GNU Radio integration with the OpenCPI infrastructure, some of which was previewed at GRCon17. It will discuss how the integration of OpenCPI with GNU Radio will allow GR blocks to have alternative implementations, such as C++ or VHDL, ready to run on CPUs or with different FPGA vendors and configurations. The OpenCPI framework selects the appropriate performance-oriented implementation of every block to be used depending on the available hardware and can execute an application across multiple, different SDRs. This talk will address how OpenCPI provides hardware vendor independence and tool-independent infrastructure and development flow. It will present how the integration of OpenCPI with GNU Radio will enable applications to both exploit all the hardware as well as be easily ported to very different hardware or facilitate technology insertion. The speaker for this talk will be James Kulp, the founder and architect for the OpenCPI project. James Kulp has more than 30 years of experience in the real-time computing industry. Currently he is a Consulting Software Architect involved with several DoD related embedded architecture efforts. He previously was the architect for scalable heterogeneous multi-computer operating systems at Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. Before joining Mercury, Mr. Kulp served as a product architecture consultant and board member of Surety Technologies, Inc. He was a systems software consultant for operating systems analysis and remote management at Digital Equipment Corporation; founder and vice president of Superscript, Inc., which made tablet-based systems; vice president of intelligent data acquisition subsystems technology for Event Technologies, Inc.; and founder and program manager at Symbolics, Inc. Mr. Kulp has also served as the computer services department head at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, and was founder and vice president of technology for Graphic Management Systems, Inc. Mr. Kulp attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied computer science, management, and architecture.