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... worstcase we're talking 2GBps of traffic per card to the main processing card. Numbers might change, but we're talking GBps speeds for sure.
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No board-to-board communications? Just board-to-host?
Cards does not need to be reconfigured dynamically.
Solution will be uploaded to the cards at power-on.
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Then the DE4 will work fine for that.
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Any pointers towards good places to start? The altera documentation obviously, but if there are any other/specific sources of information you would reccomend, I'd appreciate the gesture.
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What OS are you planning on using on the host and on the boards (if any)?
My current generation of hardware is housed in compactPCI crates. Each board has a PowerPC interface running Linux. Each crate has an x86 host CPU. The host CPU runs a virtual network driver that turns the PCI connection between host-and-peripheral boards into a network connection. The system is 120 boards housed in 8 crates. The main data flow is control system commands down to all the boards, and data coming back up. There is no need for board-to-board communication, but the network does allow it. This scheme requires an OS at either end, since you are pushing/putting network packets into the OS network stack.
On my older generation of boards. There is a DSP for local control, and its not powerful enough to implement a network stack. In that case, the host CPU programs the DMA controller on each board (a PLX PCI9054 PCI bridge) to move data between the boards and host memory. You could conceivably do something similar if you were not going to have much intelligence on your processing board, i.e., no network stack.
I have not tried accessing my Stratix IV GX kits yet over PCIe. I had expected to be able to play with the default sysfs nodes that get created for each PCI device. These nodes allow you to perform read/write accesses to PCI memory spaces. I'd recommend starting with that method, and blinking an LED :)
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
