Supernova - A scalable parallel audio synthesis server for SuperCollider

SuperCollider [5] is a computer music system based on an object-oriented real-time scripting language and a separate audio synthesis server. The synthesis server is programmed using a sequential programming model and is only able to use one CPU core for audio synthesis, so it does not make full use of today’s multi-core CPUs. In order to overcome this limitation we have implemented Supernova, a drop-in replacement for the default synthesis server ‘scsynth’. Supernova introduces extensions to the sequential programming mode, exposing parallelism explicitly to the SuperCollider language. The multi-threaded audio synthesis engine of Supernova is scalable and optimized for low-latency real-time applications.