The UCSC Kestrel Parallel Processor

UCSC kestrel Parallel Processor. Kestrel is a Research Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We have built a custom VLSI parallel processor. The 512-processor single-board system accelerates computational biology, computational chemistry, and other algorithms by factors of 20 to 40. The system is exceedingly effective at solving certain types of problems, such as gene sequence alignment and hidden Markov model training. A Smith-Waterman search engine is available on-line.