Image processing with the MGAP: a cost effective solution

Image processing applications are suitable candidates for parallelism and have at least in part motivated the design and development of some of the pioneering massively parallel processing systems including the CLIP family, the DAP, the MPP and the GAPP. By exploiting design techniques and architectures suitable for VLSI technology one can now build hardware which provides comparable performance at a fraction of the cost it took for these earlier designs. The authors describe the use of a fine-grained, massively parallel VLSI processor array, the Micro-Grained Array Processor (MGAP) for image processing applications. The array and its support systems, in their current configuration, are designed to be used as a co-processor board in a desk-top workstation. The array can be used for applications other than image processing as well. The versatility of the array and the single broad design provide a cost effective solution for a variety of parallelizable tasks