[Discuss-gnuradio] Thread scheduling for high-sensitivity, high-resolution FFTs

[Marcus D. Leech]

Let's say, for the sake of interesting discussion, that I have access to
a beastly multi-CPU 'puter, perhaps based on the
  latest Xeon 7460 series CPUs, and a quad-socket server, giving me 24
CPUs, and 48 threads.

I'm interested in wideband, high-sensitivity, high-resolution spectroscopy.

I envisage a scheme where one thread gathers an FFT-frame worth of data
(let's say from an USRP2), and doles it out to one
  of a number of other threads that are doing FFTs on these frames of
data.  All the outputs of the FFT threads are averaged
  together to produce a result that is then time averaged.

The existing FFT display schemes in Gnu Radio use a "keep-one-in-n"
scheme for the FFTs, which means that sensitivity
  is necessarily lost, due to the spectrum being under-sampled in the
time domain.

Is there existing plumbing to be able to try this sort of thing? [On a
smaller scale--I don't actually have such a monster server
  at my disposal at the moment!!].


-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator, Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org