Bispectrum signal processing on HNC´s SIMD numerical array processor (SNAP)

The bispectrum is a processing technique that can be used for improving the detection of signals in noise. It is an order N² operation performed over a two dimensional frequency plane and, because of computational demands, has not been used much in practice. HNC has developed a commercially available SIMD numerical array processor (SNAP) and implemented Tracor´s computationally demanding bispectrum signal processing code as a submission for the Gordon Bell prize. The SNAP is a SIMD array of parallel processors connected in a linear ring. A SNAP system with 32 processors (SNAP-32) demonstrated a performance of over 7.5 GIGAFLOP per million dollars.