An efficient, portable software platform for parallel image processing

A software development environment for image processing is described, which has as one of its aims to achieve portability and efficiency over a range of parallel architectures. The environment includes several tools, one of which is an optimiser which automatically generates very efficient code from a high level user coding. The first time the program is run, it does so rather inefficiently. But after an off-line optimisation phase, the same program can be rerun with significant performance improvements. Timings to date indicate a speed-up of around 5 can be achieved in the computation parts of a typical program.