Hardware accelerators for STABLE-H

The Hardware Accelerators Project (HAP) is a short term project which assesses the potential of developing a parallel system of control design. The main concepts are to develop parallel algorithms for the design of control systems at a less intuitive level than that of direct parallelism. The technique of control design is the H^+∞ technique which has received a great deal of interest due to its wide applicability, and also requires a significant amount of computational effort sequentially. In addition the CAD package STABLE-H, implemented at the department of Engineering Science Oxford University, offers a testbed facility for algorithms. In the long term the result of HAP will indicate whether more involved techniques such as super-optimal control can be implemented effectively using parallelism. The spin-off is better designed controllers which will also affect the way direct parallelism can be applied. Thus one can see two levels of parallelism-the first to optimise performance once a controller is designed and requires implementation-the second to permit the use of more complex analysis and design procedures