On the performance of a GPU-based SoC in a distributed spatial audio system

Many current system-on-chip (SoC) devices are composed of low-power multicore processors combined with a small graphics accelerator (or GPU) offering a trade-off between computational capacity and low-power consumption. In this context, spatial audio methods such as wave field synthesis (WFS) can be...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Belloch, Jose A., Badía, José Manuel, Larios Marín, Diego Francisco, Personal Vázquez, Enrique, Ferrer, Miguel, Fuster, Laura, Lupoiu, Mihaita, González, Alberto, León de Mora, Carlos, Vidal, Antonio M., Quintana Ortí, Enrique S.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/154386
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/154386
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03577-4
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Wave field synthesis
Spatial audio
Real time
Embedded systems
GPU
Jetson Nano
System-on-chip (SoC)
Descripción
Sumario:Many current system-on-chip (SoC) devices are composed of low-power multicore processors combined with a small graphics accelerator (or GPU) offering a trade-off between computational capacity and low-power consumption. In this context, spatial audio methods such as wave field synthesis (WFS) can benefit from a distributed system composed of several SoCs that collaborate to tackle the high computational cost of rendering virtual sound sources. This paper aims at evaluating important aspects dealing with a distributed WFS implementation that runs over a network of Jetson Nano boards composed of embedded GPU-based SoCs: computational per formance, energy efficiency, and synchronization issues. Our results show that the maximum efficiency is obtained when the WFS system operates the GPU frequency at 691.2 MHz, achieving 11 sources-per-Watt. Synchronization experiments using the NTP protocol show that the maximum initial delay of 10 ms between nodes does not prevent us from achieving high spatial sound quality.