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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

zdnet.com

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#71

Post by jareds »

josephagoss wrote: post #60
jareds wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much work it would take to port cpuminer to this platform for use in mining bitcoins and litecoins. Probably not worth it for bitcoins with the new FPGA hardware but could be interesting for litecoin depending on the memory access speed to main memory.

You mean the new ASIC hardware? The FPGA are ancient in the crazy world of Bitcoin, although a Litecoin FPGA will emerge in the next few month considering Litecoins value.

Looks like I was about a year behind.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#72

Post by vidarh »

st8ic wrote: post #49

These guys are completely dishonest. I saw their kickstarter video where they said that for $99 you could have "a computer many times faster than anything on the market ZOMG". Yeah, maybe it's faster for all those times during the day when you calculate matrix chain products. But for largely single-threaded tasks, like EVERYTHING you do on a day to day basis, it's going to be significantly slower than your average du…

I backed them on kickstarter, and I don't remember seeing any claim like what you claim to have seen.

To me it was always clear that the current models are not particularly fast. They may be fast "per watt", and if they succeed in their roadmap, then their future 1024 core chips may be fast for the subset of problems that they are suitable for.

In the meantime, the kickstarter page is/was careful to focus on this as a stepping stone, and developer platform for playing with the technology first and foremost, and not as being about delivering some incredibly fast computer for end users.

If anything, they've provided an extreme amount of data, down to cycle counts for memory accesses and the instruction set, and they've dumped a lot of code in our laps, including drivers etc., and the final unit actually comes with a faster version of the Zynq SoC than what they promised, after Xilinx apparently gave them an amazing deal.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#73

Post by podperson »

wmf wrote: post #68
phaet0n wrote: post #50

I'm really disappointed about how shallow the discussions about Adapteva are, and have been, on HN. To remind everyone, the H = hacker. This device is a godsend, as far as I'm concerned. For the first time ever I get fully documented access to compute array on chip. No the architecture wasn't designed for anything specific, like graphics, but that means I don't get bogged down in details I don't care about, like some…

ask what future things having something like this on a SoC would enable. I asked that and came up blank. And I haven't seen answers from anyone else, either. Has Adapteva themselves shown any examples where their chip beats a GPU?

In the comment thread on the article someone points out that the Adapteva chip doesn't do double precision floating-point, which limits its usefulness (to put it mildly). If the goal is to provide people with a low-cost platform to experiment with parallel programming, surely a decent NVidia card gives you less expensive (given you can plug it into a PCI slot and it will work) access to more CPUs that run faster and do more.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#75

Post by wmf »

dsdjung wrote: post #69

It is not easy finding people with good parallel programming skills. Hopefully, this will help things along.

Of course if you learn on Adapteva then your knowledge may not translate to the "worse" architectures that are used in the real world. If you want to learn parallel programming, the computer you already have supports threads, CSP, actors, OpenMP, OpenCL, etc.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#78

Post by fmstephe »

swalsh wrote: post #34

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.

I am very happy to see this coming out. The negativity found here is really disappointing. I will be very happy to get hold of a good number of cores running with a hardware memory model that is more out-of-order than x86.

Sounds like a glorious playground :)

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#79

Post by ethereal »

phaet0n wrote: post #50

I'm really disappointed about how shallow the discussions about Adapteva are, and have been, on HN. To remind everyone, the H = hacker. This device is a godsend, as far as I'm concerned. For the first time ever I get fully documented access to compute array on chip. No the architecture wasn't designed for anything specific, like graphics, but that means I don't get bogged down in details I don't care about, like some…

This is exactly my take on the Parallella board, and it's the exact reason why I donated to the Kickstarter back in the Fall.

I want to try my hand at writing a real, efficient, many:many message-passing API on top of SHM. It's something I've been interested in for a while (and am doing in an a side project for x86_64). Not because it hasn't been done a thousand times before, but because it's neat.

I want to write a compiler for the Parallella. Not because there aren't compilers already, but because I've never written a compiler that targets a RISC architecture before. I've never written a compiler that respects pipelining.

I want to write a parallelized FFT based on the original paper for the Parallela. I've used various FFT libraries before, but never actually implemented an FFT straight up. Why? Not because it's never been done before, but just because it's an idea that appeals to me. And for practice parallelizing algorithms . . .

I want to write a raytracer for the Parallella. Not because I haven't written a raytracer before, but because I think that I'll be able to do something interesting with a Parallella raytracer that I haven't done before: real-time (ish) raytracing. Not because that hasn't been done before, but because it'd be neat to build.

I want to build a distributed physics engine. Not because there aren't excellent open-source physics engines (Bullet, ODE, etc.) -- but because I find the problem interesting. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but never got around to. Why? Because it's interesting.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. The Parallella, I think, is a catalyst for a lot of small projects that I've wanted to do for a while. The Parallella is my excuse to spend time on random projects that will never go anywhere beyond a page on my website describing what they are, plus a link to the source code.

And, you know what? That seems perfect to me. That's why I want a Parallella, and that's why I'm eagerly awaiting mine within the next month or three. (Hopefully!)

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