From: peter@hokkaido.island.COM ()
Subject: Baudelaire of DEC: Programmable Active Memories
Originator: peter@hokkaido
Organization: Island Graphics, Marin County, California
Distribution: ba
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 17:26:40 GMT


                             Patrick Baudelaire
                                  Director
                          Paris Research Laboratory
                        Digital Equipment Corporation

                       "Programmable Active Memories as
                     Reconfigurable Hardware Coprocessors"

                     IEEE San Francisco Computer Society
                             October 28, 1992

       The October 28 meeting of the San Francisco IEEE Computer Society
       will feature Dr. Patrick Baudelaire of DEC's Paris Research
       Laboratory who will speak on Programmable Active Memories (PAM),
       a concept developed by Jean Vuillemin and his colleagues at the
       Paris Research Lab.  The talk will report on research work
       presented by Patrice Bertin, Didier Roncin, and Jean Vuillemin
       at the FPGA'92 Conference in Berkeley (February 1992).
       
       DEC's Paris Research Lab has realized two generations of PAM
       architectures based on Xilinx Logic Cell Array (LCA) chips.  The
       PAM is designed to be a programmable coprocessor system, attached
       to the system bus of a host computer.  The host's main processor
       downloads to the PAM a configuration bitstream, thus programming
       it to act as a hardware accelerator for a specific application.
       The PAM can speed up many critical software applications running
       on the host by executing part of the computations through a
       specific hardware PAM design.

       PAM applications have been developed in ten areas:
            * Long Multiplication          * Newton's mechanics
            * RSA cryptography             * Binary 2D convolution
            * Data compression             * Boltzmann machine
            * String matching              * 3D Geometry
            * Heat and Laplace equations   * Discrete cosine transform

       Execution speed proves to be as fast as any reported 
       hardware or super-computer for the corresponding applications.
       Dr. Baudelaire will discuss hardware and software design issues,
       and performance evaluations.

       Dr. Baudelaire is the Director of the Paris Research Laboratory
       (PRL), one of four research labs of Digital Equipment
       Corporation.  PRL focuses on interactive applications,
       programming technologies, and reconfigurable hardware.
       Dr. Baudelaire's research experience spans image processing,
       graphics, electronic publishing, office systems, and user
       interface engineering.  He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique
       (Paris) and earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University
       of Utah.  His professional experience includes six years in the
       Computer Science Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
       Center, and six years as a software consultant in France.  In
       1984 he co-founded and chaired a software company specialized
       in graphics and electronic publishing, which became the nucleus
       of the Paris Research Laboratory in 1987.


         
                           **************************
         
              The meeting will be held at San Francisco State University:

              Room 256
              Science and Engineering Building
              Wednesday, October 28, 1992
              Coffee at 7:30 p.m.,
              Presentation at 8:00 p.m.

              Please note:  This is not our normal room at S.F. State.
              Fees:         None
              Reservations: Limited to 60 persons.  Please telephone
                            (415) 905-4400 by October 21 to reserve.
              Directions:
         
              19th Avenue and Winston Drive (Stonestown Shopping Center).
              West on Winston Drive through the mall (tunnel under Nordstrom),
              to Lake Merced Blvd.  Left at Lake Merced and left again onto
              South State Drive.  Parking available in Lot 20 (parking garage
              on the left -- $2 for permit; buy from machine in garage).
              Take the stairs up from Lot 20 to the main campus. The 
              Science and Engineering building is on the northeast side
              of the main campus plaza, between the Gymnasium and 19th Avenue.
         
              

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