Sun is Shining, Weather is Sweet....

That’s right. Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, it’s not dark; it’s just your sunglasses. The pain on the back of your neck and shoulders is actually sunburn. It’s summer, people, and we’ve finally had some pretty fabulous weather, with the UK racking up temperatures hotter than Barbados and Tahiti at times.

But take a minute to actually think about the sun. As well as being the giver of tan lines and facilitator of days at the beach it’s also the closest star to Earth, (practically next door at only 149,600,000 km away), and is about 4.6 billion years old. We actually know quite a lot about it, thanks to solar imaging.

BittWare was involved in a project to design a solar image processing system for one of their customers. The processing requirements were quite specific – the customer was looking for adaptive image processing using multi-channel correlation. This called for a very large multi-processor system with a huge amount of I/O bandwidth, extensive integration work, and a very efficient cooling system.

 

BittWare’s solution included ten DSP-based boards, supplying 80 DSPs, and a custom designed chassis to provide efficient cooling. They drew on decades of expertise in digital signal processing design, enabling them to create an 80-DSP system that functioned with no issues, which also cooled properly. Although the hardware used was COTS hardware, significant application-specific design work was needed to ultimately provide the final system to their customer.

Enjoy the sun this weekend!