Blitzen (computer)

{{Short description|SIMD Computer System}}

{{other uses|Blitzen (disambiguation)}}

{{notability|Products|date=September 2015}}

The Blitzen was a miniaturized SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) computer system designed for NASA in the late 1980s by a team of researchers at Duke University, North Carolina State University and the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina.{{cite conference |last1=Blevins |first1=D. W. |first2=E. W. |last2=Davis |first3=R. A. |last3=Heaton |first4=J. H. |last4=Reif |title=BLITZEN: A highly integrated massively parallel machine |conference=Proc. Symp. Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation |year=1988 |url=https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19900007137.pdf}} The Blitzen was composed of a control unit and a set of simple processors connected in a grid topology. The machine influenced, to some extent, the design of the MasPar MP-1 computer.{{cite book |title=The SIMD Model of Parallel Computation |first1=Robert |last1=Cypher |first2=Jorge L. C. |last2=Sanz|publisher=Springer |year=2012 |page=31}}

Applications of the Blitzen machine include high-speed image processing, where each processor operates on a pixel of the input image and communicates with its grid neighbours to apply image processing filters on the image.{{Citation needed|date=September 2015}}