Need vision accellerator

[Bill Ross]

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:

o Easily programmable (transparent even?)
o Helpful for almost any vision task
o Fast I/O so that even simple (short) jobs can benefit
o Fits S-bus in Sun Sparcstation
o 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 at cs.cmu.edu