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From: ian@esl.UUCP (Ian Kaplan)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Systolic Arrays
Message-ID: <526@esl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-Dec-87 17:05:53 EST
Article-I.D.: esl.526
Posted: Wed Dec  2 17:05:53 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Dec-87 06:34:46 EST
References: <8711180016.AA02055@decwrl.dec.com> <4482@well.UUCP> <569@cos.COM>
Reply-To: ian@esl.UUCP (Ian Kaplan)
Organization: ESL, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.
Lines: 39

>Has anyone heard of a commercially available systolic array type of
>processor which is targetted for digital signal processing transformations
>like FFTs, IFFTs, FWHTs etc.
>Thanking everyone in advance.
>
>

  In my opinion one of the best commercially available systolic processors 
  is the Warp.  The Warp was designed by H.T. Kung and his colleagues at
  Carnegie Mellon University.  The Warp is being built and marketed by
  General Electric and costs about $350K.  The Warp has a peak performance
  of 100 MFLOPS (single precision) and about 40 MFLOPS average.  This is
  about the speed of a Cray 1S.  The hardware organization of the Warp is
  that of a ten cell systolic pipeline.  Each cell can execute a different
  program, so the Warp is a MIMD machine, although it can be used like an
  SIMD machine if the user desires.  Unlike most high speed parallel
  processors, the Warp comes with an excellent software suite that supports
  software development and debugging.  This includes a compiler for a high
  level language named W2.  Also included is Dr. Jon Webb's image
  processing library (known as the WEB library) and his Apply language for 
  image processing.  The WEB library includes several FFT routines for
  image processing.  Some signal processing operations, like adaptive beam
  forming, have also been done on the Warp.

  For more information on the Warp see "The Warp Computer: Architecture, 
  Implementation, and Performance", Marco Annaratone et al, IEEE Trans. on 
  Computers, Dec.  1987, pgs 1523-1538.

           Ian L. Kaplan
           ESL, Advanced Technology Systems
           M/S 302
           495 Java Dr.
           P.O. Box 3510
           Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3510

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