Real-time sonar beamforming on workstations using process networks and POSIX threads

We present a scalable framework for real-time data-intensive systems on commodity multiprocessor workstations. The framework is an extension of the process network model, which captures parallelism, guarantees determinate execution, and executes to bounded memory. We implement the framework using lightweight POSIX threads and prototype a 4-GFLOP sonar beamformer on a 12-processor 336-MHz Sun Enterprise server. The beamformer scales nearly linearly from 1 to 12 processors.