Blitzen (computer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Blitzen was a miniaturized SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) computer system designed for NASA in the late 1980s by a team of researchers at Duke University, North Carolina State University and the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina.[1] The Blitzen was composed of a control unit and a set of simple processors connected in a grid topology. The machine influenced, to some extent, the design of the MasPar MP-1 computer.[2]

Applications of the Blitzen machine include high-speed image processing, where each processor operates on a pixel of the input image and communicates with its grid neighbours to apply image processing filters on the image.[citation needed]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Blevins, D. W.; Davis, E. W.; Heaton, R. A.; Reif, J. H. (1988). BLITZEN: A highly integrated massively parallel machine (PDF). Proc. Symp. Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation.
  2. ^ Cypher, Robert; Sanz, Jorge L. C. (2012). The SIMD Model of Parallel Computation. Springer. p. 31.