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

We present a scalable framework for real-time data-intensive systems on com modity multiprocessor workstations. The framework is an extension of the pr ocess network model, which captures parallelism, guarantees determinate exe cution, and executes in bounded memory. We implement the framework using li ghtweight POSIX threads and prototype a 4-GFLOP sonar beamformer on a 12-pr ocessor 336-MHz Sun Enterprise server. The beamformer scales nearly linearl y from 1 to 12 processors.