On 26/10/11 18:12, Steffen Möller wrote:
Heyho,
Hi, Steffen.During the 1980's, I commissioned a 9216 processor CLIP4R (Cellular Logic Image Processor) SIMD array built for the MRC by the Rutherford Appleton labs. This used FPGA's and custom LSI processors to run IPC, which was a customised version of C for image processing (not Inter-Process Communication).
I spent three years learning to program this machine in the CLIP4R assembly language and IPC. I also worked with my colleagues on alternative loosely-coupled 680x0-based VME systems that we compared with the CLIP4R processor array. We concluded that it was not worth the huge effort of using such highly specialised systems that only a few people in the world, including me, knew how to program.
I know that things have moved on since then, but the principle remains the same. Unless there are many people using the same technology, the task of developing for it is extremely difficult. That said, using FPU's for SIMD not to mention the GPU's has come into the mainstream.
My experience was that the (huge) performance advantage of the CLIP4R system was overwhelmed by the difficulty of actually using it to do a job analysing images of metaphase chromosomes...
I would stick to using GPU's and CUDA/OpenCL if you want to improve the performance of your bioinformatics applications.
Bye, Tony.
On 10/26/2011 05:18 PM, Johan Henriksson wrote:This is some nice development!:) development this means, indeed!That said, there are some other companies that has tried this out and I doubt this will really take off.Well, I do not see any FPGA company that has collaborated with the Open Source community so much, yet ... well, indeed, there is one in Sweden behind OpenRisc [1,2], but application acceleration is yet [...]