What is "blitzen"

The Blitzen was a miniaturized SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) computer system designed for NASA in the late 1980s by a team of researchers at Duke University, North Carolina State University and the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina. The Blitzen was composed of a control unit and a set of simple processors connected in a grid topology. The machine influenced, to some extent, the design of the MasPar MP-1 computer.

Applications of the Blitzen machine include high-speed image processing, where each processor operates on a pixel of the input image and communicates with its grid neighbours to apply image processing filters on the image.

Blitzen may refer to:

• Blitzen, one of Santa Claus's reindeer, as named in "The Night Before Christmas"
• Blitzen (computer), an SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) computer system
• Blitzen, a superhero from multiple Milestone Media comic books