Online data reduction with a DSP-FPGA multiprocessor system

For the detection of cracks and corrosion in pipelines an ultrasonic measuring system (pig) was developed. During the pipeline inspection there is no communication to the outside world, the accumulated data have to be stored on a mass storage device. The amount of data for a 250 kilometre run is in the range of about 700 TBytes at a rate of 2.8 GByte/s. There exists no robust mass storage device fitting into the pipeline in order to cope with this amount of data. To overcome these difficulties a massive parallel multiprocessing system with ASIC and DSP was developed. Each of the system modules has a computing power of more then 1200 MOPS. By the aid of this system a data reduction and compression of more than a factor 7000 is achieved. The complete computing power is installed in a volume the size of a shoe box.