Blackfin-FPGA multiprocessor system for ultrasonic-data reduction

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. This amount of data has to be filtered, reduced and compressed by a factor of 7000 to store it on a storage device. To overcome these difficulties a massive parallel multiprocessing system with FPGAs and Blackfin DSPs was developed. Each of the system modules has a computing power of more then 2400 MOPS. The complete computing power is installed in a volume the size of a half shoe box.