A REAL-TIME PARALLEL APPLICATION - THE DETECTION OF GRAVITATIONAL-WAVES BY A NETWORK OF HETEROGENEOUS WORKSTATIONS

We deal with the detection of gravitational chirp signals among noisy data, where the reception and the detection are piped and run in paral lel. We consider the classical theory of signal detection, which yield s a detector with a ''bank-of-filters'' structure. We investigate dist ributed network computing in order to implement such a detector by het erogeneous high performance workstations interconnected via an Etherne t network. The goal is to design a distributed detector running on a n umber of available workstations. The computation is decomposed across the workstations in such a way to minimize communications and to match the acquisition rate. Our approach is general and can be used for net works of workstations different from those used in our experimentation . We point out that the classical performance analysis seems inappropr iate if applied to real-time detection by heterogeneous distributed sy stems, because the execution time requirements are disregarded. To tak e into account such constraints we characterize the algorithm, evaluat e performances on different workstations, and propose a task decomposi tion strategy assigning the appropriate Grain to each workstation. (C) 1998 Academic Press.