VLSI design of the Kestrel co-processor began in 1994, and the project was funded in the summer of 1995 by the NSF. We fabricated 64-processor chips using MOSIS in 1996 and 1997, fabricated the board in early 1998, and got the 512-processor system working in September of 1998.

Because it is programmable, Kestrel can execute a wide variety of algorithms. In the field of computational biology, the prototype system performs sequence comparison, sequence alignment and hidden Markov model searching 20 to 40 times faster than a 433 Mhz workstation. A similar speedup was achieved for molecular fingerprinting.

A second generation board currently in development will contain twice as many processing elements (1024 instead of 512), and should operate at twice the speed. A compiler is also in the works.

(The Kestrel project is named after the small and fast falcon that lives, among other places, on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Click here for more pictures of Kestrels.)