Digital signal processors for computation intensive statistics and simulation

The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the feasibility of using a digital signal processor (DSP) as a statistical computation "number cruncher" in a PC environment. The specific goals were to demonstrate that a DSP has high-speed, low-cost statistical computation and simulation capability, and that it is easy to interface to a conventional personal computer (PC). Through testing a variety of statistical algorithms, the DSP computational speedup was found to be effective. The next phase of our research will consist of prototyping a DSP-based statistics workstation.