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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

zdnet.com

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#31

Post by tekacs »

amalag wrote: post #20
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…

Their answer to 'Why do you call the Parallella a supercomputer?' is also pretty curious: ;)

> The Parallella project is not a board, it's intended to be a long term computing project and community dedicated to advancing parallel computing.

> The current $99 board aren't considered supercomputers by 2012 standards, but a cluster of 10 Parallella boards would have been considered a supercomputer 10 years ago.

Wait, what? :D (emphasis mine)

> Our goal is to put a bona-fida supercomputer in the hands of everyone as soon as possible but the first Parallella board is just the first step. Once we have a strong community in place, work will being on PCIe boards containing multiple 1024-core chips with 2048 GFLOPS of double precision performance per chip. At that point, there should be no question that the Parallella would qualify as a true supercomputing platform.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#32

Post by danbruc »

helpbygrace wrote: post #28
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It should read 8 FLOPS per cycle double precision. So a 3 GHz 4 core Ivy Bridge processor could theoretically peak at 96 GFLOPS double precision, 192 GFLOPS single precision.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#33

Post by Uchikoma »

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…

Most others - like my MacBook here [1] - are advertising GHz / core not "summing" the cores.

So the statement "PC users understand" is false.

[1] http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#34

Post by swalsh »

There's so much negativity in this thread, wasn't the whole idea that these guys had plans and an architecture to scale up to the order of a terra-flop by 2014, and 20 by 2022? And look! they're shipping. This first chip may not be impressive, but I'll welcome a new player to the market who has big plans to innovate.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#35

Post by sp332 »

DanBC wrote: post #13
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.

Doing a single hash isn't harder though. Increased difficulty just means you have to do more hashes. So the numbers given should still be about right.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#36

Post by mas921 »

a supercomputer is cluster of machines connected by high throughput, low latency interconnect.

Hundreds of servers connected together with 1Gigabit is still a "grid cluster" .. you need at least 10Gigabit Ethernet (over iWARP) or infiniband (RDMA) to be considered a supercomputer.

This is marketing B.S.! this B.S. is "emphasized" by the 90GFLOPS = 45Ghz thing. 90GFLOPS is by a single 45GHz "ALU" (perhaps an ALU doing Multiply-Add - MADD op.) not a full fledged CPU (like the i7 or Xeon, which has 4-8 cores with each core having 3 ALU's) as the readers might imply.

For example the i7 3770K does 121.6GFLOPS @ "only" 3.5Ghz (ref> table page 2 http://elrond.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/papers/WorldComp2012...)

measuring performance with Ghz is soooo Penitum III! the whole thing is very misleading, and I don't like that!

Supercomputer? not even funny! Its a Super-"Raspberry Pi". That's it!

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#37

Post by [deleted] »

helpbygrace wrote: post #28
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

[deleted]

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#38

Post by IanCal »

helpbygrace wrote: post #22
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's nowhere near fast enough. My 7970s can push out about 1.3Ghash/s and combined they are capable of around 7 TFLOPs. When (/if) they release the BFL Jalapeño it'll run at 5 Ghash/s and be powered by USB. 90 GFLOPs is equivalent to a decent processor, but nowhere near powerful enough for bitcoin mining.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#39

Post by mkl »

amalag wrote: post #15
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/

Each of the 64 cores can independently run arbitrary C/C++ code, which is much more flexible than a GPU. Each core has 32KB of local memory, which can also be accessed by the other cores, and there's 1GB of external memory too.

Specs: http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e64g401/

Architecture: http://www.adapteva.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/epiphany_...

SDK docs: http://www.adapteva.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/epiphany_...

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#40

Post by wagtail »

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…

Exactly. That's the real point. Are you going to be able to run these together and get on the TOP500. Lord no! But, can you learn how to parallel program on one? Sure, and that's no small matter.
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