The nature of modern astronomy means that a number of interesting problems exhibit a substantial computational bound and\r\nthis situation is gradually worsening. Scientists, increasingly fighting for valuable resources on conventional high-performance\r\ncomputing (HPC) facilitiesââ?¬â?often with a limited customizable user environmentââ?¬â?are increasingly looking to hardware acceleration\r\nsolutions. We describe here a heterogeneous CPU/GPGPU/FPGA desktop computing system (the ââ?¬Å?Chimeraââ?¬Â), built with\r\ncommercial-off-the-shelf components. We show that this platform may be a viable alternative solution to many common computationally\r\nbound problems found in astronomy, however, not without significant challenges. The most significant bottleneck\r\nin pipelines involving real data is most likely to be the interconnect (in this case the PCI Express bus residing on the CPU\r\nmotherboard). Finally, we speculate on the merits of our Chimera system on the entire landscape of parallel computing, through\r\nthe analysis of representative problems from UC Berkeleyââ?¬â?¢s ââ?¬Å?Thirteen Dwarves.ââ?¬Â
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