*Disclaimer*
I do not work for NI--you should probably consult an NI sales representative to discuss your system requirements. You might even inquire about a proof of concept if you are serious about the system since I can only speculate as to how your processing requirements will fare on a particular system.
Having said that, here is a breakdown of your application requirements as I see them (I haven't included data logging as a concern because you didn't mention it, but if you do intend to stream any data to disk that opens up a whole new set of requirements as disk write speeds can often be the bottleneck):
Synchronization:
The synchronization of X Series cards would be relatively trivial for the software developer given that X Series cards support multi-device tasks.
Sample Rate / Bus Throughput:
You're looking at ~370 MB/s of data assuming 100 channels 1.84 ~1.852 MHz (integer divide downs of 100 MHz only). The sampling and channel requirements actually dictate 6x 6368s and 1x 6366 if going with an X Series solution as the 635x max out at 1.25 MHz per channel.
I'm confident that you can find a chassis/controller combo which is capable of transferring the data fast enough across the bus.
Chassis Selection:
Each X Series has a PCIe 1.0 x1 connection. You'll need 7 modules + 1 controller to accomodate your channels.
I'd suggest the 1082. Slot 2 has a dedicated PCIe x4 lane and every other slot shares a PCIe x4 lane with the adjacent slot (3-4, 5-6, 7-8). See here.
You might instead consider a 1078 chassis. The PXIe slots have a dedicated PCIe x1 lane and the hybrid slots share a single PCIe x4 switch. See here. Having 5 modules on a single switch seems undesirable to me but it should work just fine at the data rates you need.
Don't go with the 1062Q chassis. X Series DAQ cards will not work in PXI slots (only PXIe).
Controller Selection:
The 8135 looks interesting but I don't have any experience with it myself. Based on the spec, the 8 GB/s of system bandwidth leads me to believe that there are 4 dedicated PCIe 2.0 x4 lanes (actually, found it in the specs, the x16 PCIe slot on the intel is indeed broken down into 4x4 lanes to service the backplane). It seems that the 8135 is also the top-of NI's line with regard to processing power, which it sounds like you might need given that you are crunching a fair amount of data in real-time.
I can only speculate as to your processor/memory requirements. If the 8135 does not offer enough you could look into an external PC and transfer the data via MXI Express. Just be sure that you choose a MXI Express card with appropriate bandwidth.
Processing:
This is the big unknown. Running a desktop OS to do time-critical processing in real time is probably not ideal. A Real-Time operating system such as PharLap (I believe it is an option on the 8135) would provide determinism to the application (e.g. so it doesn't ever fail due to Windows deciding to run some other background process).
You might even look into offloading some of the processing to an FPGA, but I'm going to stop here because at this point you would probably be better off contacting somebody form NI so you can go through your exact requirements and they can help you decide what solution makes the most sense.
I hope this helps!
Best Regards,
John Passiak
