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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

zdnet.com

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#2

Post by rys »

I find it incredibly dishonest of Adapteva to equate it to a "theoretical 45 GHz CPU". There are much better ways to talk about the performance level of their hardware than that metric, especially given the rest of the text in their Kickstarter pitch is aimed at people who need to inherently understand the hardware's execution model in order to program it effectively.

The computing industry has established language and metrics to discuss computing performance and, while the waters often get muddied when the hardware is wide, that's a step too far.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#4

Post by mtrimpe »

rys wrote: post #2

I find it incredibly dishonest of Adapteva to equate it to a "theoretical 45 GHz CPU". There are much better ways to talk about the performance level of their hardware than that metric, especially given the rest of the text in their Kickstarter pitch is aimed at people who need to inherently understand the hardware's execution model in order to program it effectively. The computing industry has established language a…

  This board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or — in terms 
  PC users understand — about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU.
That doesn't seem too outrageous to me.

Edit: They state the real fact and then give another figure explicitly stating it's an attempt to translate this into a metric the average user can somewhat relate to.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Computing it seems that they're off by a factor of two, but I'm guessing that's just an honest mistake.

Second edit: I was under the impression that this was the result of dumbing down by a journalist, however it seems it's from Parallela itself. That is a bit disingenuous indeed.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#7

Post by Xcelerate »

As someone who uses supercomputers, I'm not sure I entirely understand the market of this product. It's really cool and I'd love to have one to tinker with, but due to its high parallelization, I see no benefit of using this over a graphics card. I'm not sure if $99 can get you a GPU that reaches 90 GFlops though... perhaps that's where the benefit lies.

EDIT: After reviewing their website, I notice they state

> One important goal of Parallella is to teach parallel programming...

In this respect, I can see how this is useful. Adapting scientific software to GPUs can be difficult and isn't the easiest thing to get into for your average person. This board, with its open-source toolkit and community could make this process a lot easier.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#8

Post by lucb1e »

So how fast is this really? It doesn't sound like much of a supercomputer to me. If it were so super for $99, it'd have been hyped everywhere already and gamers would not buy desktops anymore. It rather sounds like a platform to practice multithreading on.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#10

Post by Xcelerate »

mtrimpe wrote: post #4
rys wrote: post #2

I find it incredibly dishonest of Adapteva to equate it to a "theoretical 45 GHz CPU". There are much better ways to talk about the performance level of their hardware than that metric, especially given the rest of the text in their Kickstarter pitch is aimed at people who need to inherently understand the hardware's execution model in order to program it effectively. The computing industry has established language a…

This board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or — in terms PC users understand — about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU. That doesn't seem too outrageous to me. Edit: They state the real fact and then give another figure explicitly stating it's an attempt to translate this into a metric the average user can somewhat relate to. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Computing it seems that the…

Me neither. The only catch is that you can't get serial computation that fast, but I assume anyone buying something called "Parallella" would realize that already.
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