Beowulf And Digital Signal Processing - Success!

[Greg Lindahl]

> Texas instrument is selling its (peak) 60MFlop chip TMS320C32 for $9.95,

But for most people's purposes, they need a system built around it,
not just a cheap chip.

> The columbia QCD machine has 8192 such hips, connected by a 4d
> serial network(Space+time).

And the SYSTEM is very expensive. I suspect that it is not more
cost-effective than a commodity cluster, despite being built with $10
cpus.

> 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)

That is an area of active interest in the military and other areas:
boards plugged into a general purpose system. Deep Thought was built
that way. But ease-of-use, pricing, and keeping up with technology
trends have always been problems. The issues are the same as with
"attached processors" or "array processors" from the 1960's and
1970's.

-- g