Week 01b: Divide and Conquer

This week we will begin dividing up the work for this project. Alex will be focusing on improving and maintaining the hardware while Trevor will be working on programming with the GPU.

Alex Esclamdo:

In terms of improving and maintaining the hardware, over the next couple of weeks I will schedule sessions with Dr. Asghari in order to be more familiar with system maintenance. For this upcoming week, I will be contacting Tektronix in order to figure out methods for streaming data from the MS054 oscilloscope to the workstation. Additionally, Dr. Asghari will help with familiarization with the new scanner, as we hope to implement this to increase A-Scan rates. Eventually, I plan to remodify the system back to a single probe for higher sensitivity in conjunction with the 1GHz scope.

Trevor Wong:

This week I will be diving into PyCUDA, which gives Pythonic access to Nvidia’s CUDA parallel processing API. This will include reading documentation and working with sample code. Both these will help familiarize me with PyCUDA and provide a baseline for the future program. Once I understand the basics I will be writing simple test programs. These test codes will test only the FFT algorithm using the GPU, it will be completely separate from the project’s code and would not need the system in any way to run. This is a step by step approach to get each piece of the program working before putting it all together for the imaging system.