Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] USRP2 with a Switch

[Juha Vierinen]

I don't know that much about this, but I am also interested in getting
a lot of USRP2s working coherently. I currently have approximately the
same setup as you do, but I am also curious about how to expand it.
Please let us know how you advance on this front.

The solution that I am playing with right now is to just make a
cluster of PCs with up to four USRP2s per PC. This way I also get a
compute cluster as a by-product. I need a lot of computing power for
processing my data anyway, and it is nice to have that power close to
the data. Once the data is in the cluster, the data can then be
channeled through standard gigabit ethernet switches (e.g., using MPI)
without problems.

However, I would welcome a feature that would allow USRP2s to be
hooked up into a switch.

juha

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 18:53, ValentinG <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> We have 12 USRP2 boards which we would like to synchronise and run in a
> phase array system as an expansion of the 4 element system we currently have
> running using the VRT branch of GNURadio.
>
> Currently we use a 4 port PCIe Gb Ethernet Card to connect the USRP2 boards
> to the host computer. Our Communications group suggested that we could use
> an Ethernet switch to support 12 boards instead of trying to find a computer
> we can stuff that many Ethernet cards in to.
>
> Data from all 4 boards should get streamed into a data buffer on the switch
> and then be accessed sequentially by the host computer at a rate to avoid
> the over-run of the buffers. Switches work on the ethernet layer and hence
> the protocol should be compatible.
>
> We have read about some problems on the forums regarding using a switch for
> the USRP2's. Does anybody know if it is a realistic task to be able to use a
> switch to stream data in from multiple boards in this manner and how one
> might start in creating a system which can do this? Does a new protocol for
> sending packets to the computer need to be created. If so then where is the
> current protocol specified?
>
> Best regards,
> Marc.
> --
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> http://old.nabble.com/USRP2-with-a-Switch-tp28003772p28003772.html
> Sent from the GnuRadio mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
>
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