Applications
The MPP was initially developed for high-speed analysis of satellite images. In early tests, it was able to extract and separate different land-use areas on Landsat imagery in 18 seconds, as compared with 7 hours on a DEC VAX 11/780.
Once the system was put into production use, NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications solicited proposals from scientists across the country to test and implement a wide range of computational algorithms on the MPP. 40 projects were accepted, to form the "MPP Working Group"; results of most of them were presented at the First Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, in 1986.
Some examples of applications that were made of the MPP are:
- Signal processing of synthetic aperture radar data
- Generating topographic maps via stereo analysis of satellite images
- Mathematical modeling of ocean circulation
- Ray traced computer graphics
- Neural networks
- Solving large systems of linear equations
- Simulation of cosmic ray charged particle transport
- High resolution Mandelbrot sets
Read more about this topic: Goodyear MPP