Beowulf And Digital Signal Processing - Success!

[Rahul Dave]

> 
> 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.
> 
Texas instrument is selling its (peak) 60MFlop chip TMS320C32 for $9.95,
so these could be really bought in bulk. The columbia QCD machine has
8192 such hips, connected by a 4d serial network(Space+time). I believe each
chip can address 64GB of RAM too. One could easily host this on a Linux
box, and even write for it--I believe egcs has a port to this series of
chips.(cross-compiler)
Rahul