Beowulf And Digital Signal Processing - Success!

[Huntress, Gary B.]

You are, of course, absolutely correct.  I would never propose that a
486, or even a pentium is a replacement for a decent DSP (I think that
there are several DSPs that can do 1k complex FFTs in single digit micro
seconds).  DSPs are great for embedded work once the algorithms have
been fully developed.  I still like to do all my research in a friendly
workstation environment.   

The purpose of my project was really just to demonstrate some form of
numerical computation in a clustered environment to those in my lab.  As
my dad would say, "It's not the fact that the monkey paints well, its
the fact that the monkey can paint at all..."

 
Gary H.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	kragen@pobox.com [SMTP:kragen@pobox.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, September 30, 1998 8:59 AM
> To:	Huntress, Gary B.
> Cc:	'beowulf@beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov'
> Subject:	Re: Beowulf And Digital Signal Processing - Success!
> 
> On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Huntress, Gary B. wrote:
> > With 10 nodes (9 worker nodes) I observed a speedup of 8.5 with an
> 8k
> > FFT.  I'm very pleased with these results, and I just thought I'd
> share
> > a success story.  I strongly suspect that this will lead to more use
> of
> > clusters in the DSP area (anyone doing this?  I'd love to hear from
> > you).
> 
> I would think that, if you had a lot of DSP work to do, it'd be
> cheaper
> to do it with DSPs than with 486s.  Something like the TigerSHARC
> card.  Doing matrix multiplies, vector math, or Fourier transforms is
> likely to be a heck of a lot faster with DSPs than with x86s -- like a
> factor of 10 for CPUs that cost the same amount.
> 
> Kragen
> 
> -- 
> <kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker
> <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
> A well designed system must take people into account.  . . .  It's
> hard to
> build a system that provides strong authentication on top of systems
> that
> can be penetrated by knowing someone's mother's maiden name.  --
> Schneier