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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

zdnet.com

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#11

Post by Tuna-Fish »

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…

A single Ivy Bridge core has 8 Flops/MHz of computing power. 45GHz Ivy Bridge would be able to do 360GFlops.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#13

Post by DanBC »

yatsyk wrote: post #3

How many megahashes this hardware computes?

They say 90 GFlops.

(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26824.20;wap2)

> For example a Radeon 6990 has 5.2 gigaFLOPS of computing power[1] and yields roughly 800 megahash/s in bitcoin mining.

That was in July 2011. Mining is harder now.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#14

Post by Leszek »

lucb1e wrote: post #8

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.

Supercomputer =/= "a fast computer".

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#15

Post by amalag »

Xcelerate wrote: post #7

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…

Comparing it with a GPU is a natural discussion to have. I believe there is more information on their website to answer the question. But maybe someone else can explain the programming paradigm difference. http://www.adapteva.com/introduction/

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#16

Post by lgeek »

Xcelerate wrote: post #7

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…

You can buy an AMD 7750 for $99, which theoretically gives you in the range of 800-900 GFLOPS (single precision).

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#17

Post by kryptiskt »

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…

The only reason it isn't a big lie is that it's an utterly meaningless statement. In any case it is a misrepresentation of what modern CPUs are capable of.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#18

Post by trotsky »

Can anyone explain what the practical differences between something like this and a gpgpu approach? It doesn't sound particularly performant compared to modern gpus otherwise. Maybe they add in some more general purpose instructions for a little more flexibility?

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#19

Post by wuest »

Xcelerate wrote: post #7

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…

It's an interesting (read: niche) market, to be sure. It's the same market as someone who might buy 8 raspberry pi boards, or 4 ODroid U2 machines for the purpose of learning about parallel computation.

The Epipchany chip (the coprocessor on these boards) is supported as of GCC 4.8, so we also may see some novel ways to offload work to this chip in the future.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#20

Post by amalag »

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…

They do answer that on their kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-su...

Why do you say the Parallella is a 45GHz computer?

We have received a lot of negative feedback regarding this number so we want to explain the meaning and motivation. A single number can never characterize the performance of an architecture. The only thing that really matters is how many seconds and how many joules YOUR application consumes on a specific platform.

Still, we think multiplying the core frequency(700MHz) times the number of cores (64) is as good a metric as any. As a comparison point, the theoretical peak GFLOPS number often quoted for GPUs is really only reachable if you have an application with significant data parallelism and limited branching. Other numbers used in the past by processors include: peak GFLOPS, MIPS, Dhrystone scores, CoreMark scores, SPEC scores, Linpack scores, etc. Taken by themselves, datasheet specs mean very little. We have published all of our data and manuals and we hope it's clear what our architecture can do. If not, let us know how we can convince you.

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