Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Google Summer of Code 2014 applicant : Optimization with VOLK

[Martin Braun]

On 02/24/2014 09:33 PM, Abhishek Bhowmick wrote:
> Firstly, congratulations on being accepted as a mentor organization.
> 
> Thanks for the pointers to gr-atsc and gr-80211. I have started
> looking there as a
> starting point. Are there similar modules which are undergoing volk
> speedup fixes?

I had started working on accelerating the OFDM sync blocks in-tree...
I'd need to dig around a bit to get that up to date. Contact me off-list
if you want to see about this.

> I am also trying to meet up with other people who have been using GNU radio
> to identify potential modules for acceleration. As you are now a
> mentor organization, I feel it's a good time for us to get into
> detailed discussions.

Absolutely, that goes for you and all other applicants. The ideas list
is just to get you started, for successful participation, you will need
to write a proposal that details what you plan to do for 3 months of
full-time coding.

>>> At the moment the only mainstream ISA not being targeted is probably
>>> AVX2, which has
>>> some nice features for the type of kernels we're doing.  If you went
>>> that route it would likely need add
>>> protokernels to a pretty large number of kernels.
>>>
>>> Nathan
> 
> This also seems to be promising, though I guess it would require me to
> come up to speed with AVX2 (which I would love to do). Could you
> please elaborate
> a little on the kind of beneficial features you have in mind ? I am
> concerned that the
> job of adding proto-kernels might turn out to be mundane/tedious ? Is
> that a valid
> concern ?

That's highly subjective :) If you don't know much about those specific
SIMD instruction sets, it's probably neither. On the other hand, if
you're already an expert, it's not that much work, and you can quickly
benefit the project. I don't think anyone expects you to do 3 months of
proto-kernel development, so you can balance it in your project proposal.

M