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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#21
post #13
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.

Radeon 6990 is 5.1 TERAflops (5099 GigaFLOPS) ... several orders of magnitude faster than this thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_6000_Series#Northern_...

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#22
post #3

How many megahashes this hardware computes?

Much, much less than the specialized ASIC platforms do.

But when we consider the consuming power of ASIC platform, I think this board has strength. They said this board consumes 5 watt for typical jobs.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#23
post #4
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…

It is 90 GFLOPS at less that 5 Watts. That's not too shabby. Adapteva claims that the Epiphany cores have a GFLOPS/W ratio of 50.

See here: http://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2012-08-27/processors-that-ca...

Also, the boards for the backers feature a ZYNQ-7020 SOC by XILINX which sports a 1.3M Gate FPGA, available to the user. This ain't bad either.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#24
post #13
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.

Cayman XT [Radeon 6970] outputs 2.7 TFLOPS in Single-Precision and 675 GFLOPS in Dual Precision. [1] I think the 6990 is just two of those, or at least that's normally their convention.

[1] http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/12/13/amd-radeon-h...

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#25
post #18

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?

If nothing else it's very small and uses very little power

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#26

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 get close to 1TF in the GPU space for $99 these days, but at much lower power efficiency. The Adapteva hardware looks to be around 18GF/W, whereas a GPU is about half that at $99.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#27

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…

Could it be good for path finding and other NP Hard problems? It could do good things for the AI world if that's the case.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#28
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are correct for the first clause(8 Flops/MHz), 45GHz of Ivy Bridge core has 360k Flops (8 Flops/MHz * 45GHz ==> 8 Flops * 45k).

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#30
post #20
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…

They are clearly wrong. The purpose of higher clock rates is to produce a given answer in a smaller amount of time (latency). The purpose of adding more processors (cores) is to produce more answers in a given time (throughput). They are free to report their results using any standard measurement of throughput. Their answer is weasely.

But then, clock rate is irrelevant to latency and throughput. Really matters how much more work per cycle you get done, how fast you can move IO, and the cost of throughput per watt (and whether the system can meet your requirements at all).

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