99

Application Specific Chips (ASICs)

Finally, it is also possible to use special computer chips on which exactly one computer

program runs “hard-wired”, so to speak, i.e. one computer chip for exactly one program.

This is then an Application Specific Chip (ASIC). Field-programmable gate arrays

(FPGAs) are much more expensive, but more flexible and allow to pre-test different ASICs

in their properties after appropriate programming of the FGPR. ASICs have been and

continue to be used for special programs. For example, the company Paracell had devel­

oped a chip for BLAST. The sequence comparison then runs much faster on this ASIC,

and the Paracell computer was thus able to identify words very quickly and use them for

BLAST (likewise the American secret service to monitor the Internet, s. Chap. 16). Even

at present there are a number of such special computer chips for bioinformatics. However,

these are used less frequently than the other solutions in this paragraph.

8.4

NP Problems Are Not Easy to Grasp

­

8.2

8.2

Therefore, computer scientists, mathematicians and bioinformaticians keep trying to

show that there is a way to trace NP-problems back to P-problems in general. So far,

8.4  NP Problems Are Not Easy to Grasp