Swiss Sound 47 - Studer

The SCORE Platform:
A scalable design for high-end
DSP clustering in professional
audio applications
Digital Signal Processing turned “classical” mixing consoles into versatile
and flexible systems for various types of application fields several years ago.
The requirements of today’s mixing engines are not only higher sampling
rates and more audio channels but also higher degree of application
diversity while maintaining robustness and ease of use.
The SCORE Platform is our solution to these requirements.
Adrian Riedo
The Platform
Based on the philosophy of what was called the
“Performa Core” fi rst introduced with the
Studer D950 back in 1997 and later used with
the Vista Series in 2001 the SCORE Platform
follows a simple but powerful concept: separate
backend data communication from the processing
elements. The heart of the SCORE Platform
is therefore not the DSP itself but our custom
high-speed inter-cluster communication fabric.
The purely passive backplane is designed for
standard 19 inch frames and can handle data
rates up to 6.4 Gbps and more while supporting
up to 21 plug-in cards where at least one card is
the system host. The internal capacity goes
above 4’000 audio channels that are globally
accessible for any processing element within the
system (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1:
SCORE cluster overview
Blocks of individual DSP clusters become
highly scalable thanks to a system architecture
which is parallel throughout (Fig. 1).
SCORE platform supercluster
System monitoring and maintenance
Fig. 2: Inter-cluster backbone
DSP Cluster
DSP Cluster
DSP Cluster
DSP Cluster
DSP Cluster
••••••••••••••••••••••
DSP Cluster
DSP Cluster
Studer high-speed inter-cluster communication fabric
System Host
All slots of the SCORE frame are fully hotswappable
and are permanently monitored
from the system host.
The SCORE Platform is designed from the
bottom up for full redundancy support should
any processing element in the system fail.
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Swiss Sound May 2004 – No 47