Applying graphics processor acceleration in a software defined radio prototyping environment

With higher bandwidth requirements and more complex protocols, software defined radio (SDR) has ever growing computational demands. SDR applications have different levels of parallelism that can be exploited on multicore platforms, but design and programming difficulties have inhibited the adoption of specialized multicore platforms like graphics processors (GPUs). In this work we propose a new design flow that augments a popular existing SDR development environment (GNU Radio), with a dataflow foundation and a stand-alone GPU accelerated library. The approach gives an SDR developer the ability to prototype a GPU accelerated application and explore its design space fast and effectively. We demonstrate this design flow on a standard SDR benchmark and show that deciding how to utilize a GPU can be non-trivial for even relatively simple applications.