Scalable Advanced Sensor Processor (SASP) for Acoustic Applications

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes the Scalable Advanced Sensor Processor (SASP), which integrates state-of-the-art embedded parallel processing technologies with a set of highly optimized signal and image processing libraries to provide an open, scalable, power-aware, easy-to-use platform for acoustic processing on a wide range of platforms, from small countermeaures and UUVs up to destroyer-class surface ships. The processor trade off study will include a comprehensive survey of emerging mobile computing devices, with selected benchmarks on leading platforms, with a focus on an advanced dual-core ARM system-on-chip processor (Xilinx Zynq-7010) and the Adapteva Epiphany 64-core signal processing engine. A notional design based on these two components could provide a system throughput of up to 110 GFLOPS within a power envelope of approximately 7 watts. These two hardware technologies are just emerging from the commercial processing market, and their integration with multi-channel data acquisition interfaces in a deployable package could provide a revolutionary step forward in available maritime processor density.