wross@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Bill Ross) (01/29/91)
We run a variety of computer vision tasks (fft's, neural nets,
and other typical vision operations) on our Sun Sparcstations.
In many cases, we find that the Sparcs are too slow to do what
we want to get done. In particular, the floating point is often
inadequate. It seems that there should be a spiffy S-bus card
that can solve all our problems. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Here are some very rough guidelines:
Easily programmable (transparent even?)
Helpful for almost any vision task
Fast I/O so that even simple (short) jobs can benefit
Fits S-bus in Sun Sparcstation
Cheap enough that I can put one in each of our machines
The idea isn't to make any any single problem run super-fast,
but to make it simple to speed up whatever problem you are
working on (with minimum inconvenience in programmimg). Am I
correct that most of the cheaper array processors, parallel
machines and DSP engines are likely to be too limited in
application? Is there any way to speed up the Sparc floating
point performance by adding a piggy-back board with a big
Weitek chip or something on it?
Thanks for any and all ideas!
Bill Ross
wross@cs.cmu.eduraja@bombay.cps.msu.edu (Narayan S. Raja) (01/31/91)
In article <12811@hubcap.clemson.edu>, (Bill Ross) writes:
< We run a variety of computer vision tasks (fft's, neural nets,
< and other typical vision operations) on our Sun Sparcstations.
< In many cases, we find that the Sparcs are too slow to do what
< we want to get done. In particular, the floating point is often
< inadequate. It seems that there should be a spiffy S-bus card
< that can solve all our problems. Does anyone have any suggestions?
About other add-ons I have no idea, but Sun
itself apparently has an add-on called "taac".
Output of "man taac" is appended.
**Pl. summarize responses** to this newsgroup.
Thanks in advance,
Narayan Sriranga Raja.
------------------------------------------------------------------
TAAC(4S) DEVICES AND NETWORK INTERFACES TAAC(4S)
NAME
taac - Sun applications accelerator
DESCRIPTION
The taac interface supports the optional TAAC-1 Applications
Accelerator. This add-on device is composed of a very-
long-instruction-word computation engine, coupled with an
8MB memory array. This memory area can be used as a frame
buffer or as storage for large data sets.
------------------------------------------------------------------surfer@Erc.MsState.Edu (John West) (02/07/91)
If you are doing lots of FFT's and other image processing operations, you may be interested in looking at some of the third party add on external boxes for Sun workstations. There are several which have been around for a while. For on-board graphics solutions, Sun recently introduced two new graphics accelerators when they introduced the SPARCstation 2. They are the GS and the GT option. They also introduced the VX/MVX graphics subsystem at SIGGRAPH '90. The quickie explanation of these products follows: GS: 24bit framebuffer, 16bit Zbuffer, this card uses all 3 S bus slots on a SS2. It provides some 2D and 3D graphics acceleration. GT: 24bit (double)framebuffer, 24bit Zbuffer, this card resides in an external chasis. It provides impressive 3D graphics acceleration. VX/MVX: Sun's i860 graphics subsystem! You need a SPARCstation 330 for this option (requires VME slots). The VX/MVX combo provides you with a *hot* framebuffer card (VX) and a 4 PE i860 accelerator card(MVX) for your *cpu hogging* graphics applications. For more information, reuest the appropriate `Technical White Papers' from you local Sun rep. If you wish to chit-chat about these accelerators, send me personal mail to the address shown below. I have no affiliation with Sun Microsystems. I am a Sun (& SGI) user. -- hangin' ten: -John West- MSUNSFERC4CFS surfer@erc.msstate.edu Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation Mississippi State University ***** National Science Foundation