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Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

zdnet.com

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Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#131

Post by mrb »

rys wrote: post #26
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 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.

The AMD Radeon HD 7790 ($150) does 21 GFLOPS/Watt. So I would say Adapteva is definitely comparable to GPUs in this approximate price range.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#132

Post by solistice »

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…

When I was 13, I started to tinker around with electronics. I didn't really have a proper grasp of electronics except from electronics playsets at 8-10. I designed some circuits using the bits of digital logic knowledge I had, but they called for dozens of chips to implement simple tasks. Then, I stumbled across 8bit AVRs. The possibilities compared to my feeble steps around XOR gates and Flip Flop ICs...they put me in awe. So I started playing around with it, and tried to push bounds, optimize code, adressing, busses, multiplexing, etc. And then I found out about the 32 bit ARM Chips that came for a similar price to the AVRs. Again, the possibilities...And then CPLDs and FPGAs, Neuronal Network ICs, and so on. Every single time, this rush of excitement. I'm an addict, amn't I?

And the Adapteva is similar. From what it sounds like, you just have this brute power at your fingertips. I'll read into the specs a little bit, but it sounds frankly awe inspiring even before opening them up. Want to PWM control 500 leds individually? From what it sounds like in this article, the thing got power for double (off the top of my head). Want to create stereooptic 3d models using a camera and an IMU in real time? It sounds like it can do that (over the thumb calculation). Want to overlay your own 3d models into it and display them using the occulus 3d?

What I'm trying to get across is, if you're not as excited as if you found out santa is real, you're not excited enough.

EDIT: THERE'S A D*"§ FPGA ON THAT THING!!!! I'll stop datasheeting to avoid hyperventilation.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#133

Post by mrb »

stephencanon wrote: post #52
helpbygrace wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

8 double-precision flops/cycle/core is the correct figure for Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge. With Haswell adding FMA, that figure doubles again(!)

Hum, no. Sandy/Ivy Bridge can only execute 4 double-precision instructions per cycle per core, in the form of two SSE instructions per cycle (one instruction doing adds, the other doing muls, executed by different units).

Doing 8 double-precision instructions per cycle would translate to either four 128-bit SSE instructions, or two 256-bit AVX instructions per cycle, which is not possible (unless I did not keep track of the latest AVX capabilities).

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#134

Post by qdog »

sliverstorm wrote: post #109
vidarh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a developer board. The product is the chips, not this board. This board is there mainly to get a dev board in the hands of people who might want to build cool stuff with it. That they've actually managed to get it price competitive with a lot of cheap ARM computers, despite sporting a Zynq (ARM SoC with built in FPGA) is amazing.

Can't help but wonder if they are in fact taking a loss, backed by Adapteva.

They seem to actually have support from some of the hardware manufacturers. From Update #31 "Much gratitude goes out to the component manufacturers who really “got it” (Xilinx, Analog Devices, Intersil, Micron, Microchip, Samtec all deserve special thanks). Without their help we would be losing $100 per board!"

So, the backers are getting a Very Good Deal, with the hopes that a successful launch will make demand high enough to make the $99 viable with volume.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#135

Post by qdog »

tempaccount9473 wrote: post #65
pmorici wrote: post #54

Can it mine BitCoin competitively?

> Can it mine BitCoin competitively? Prior to the popularity of mining using GPUs, it would have been the shizzle. Today's ASIC-based systems will hash circles around it.

It's only pulling 2W, so it really depends on the performance per W. Maybe that'll be my first project...

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#138

Post by zmmmmm »

I wish these things had just a bit more memory. Most of the interesting algorithms I work with (bioinformatics) really want 4G of memory. A lot of them you can squeeze down to 2G but 1G is just out of the question.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#139

Post by w34 »

While I find this quite exciting from a pure developer perspective, it also reminded me that I haven't had anything I'd call a Desktop box in quite some time.

If I were to ever get a Desktop machine again, it would have to be cheap and light, definitely don't want anything clunky, otherwise a laptop seems preferable to me. There do not seem that many products that would fill that gap, Intel's NUC is too expensive, the Raspberry PI too slow. Apple's mini Mac seems like the best proposition in this segment.

I wonder if the Parallela could not only be used as development center, but also as a Desktop computer? It won't run any fancy games, that's clear, but it may actually be usable for browsing, watching videos and office duties.

Re: Parallella, a $99 Linux Supercomputer

#140

Post by 1amzave »

jholman wrote: post #123
ludston wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First of all, which is the NP-hard pathfinding problem you're talking about? When I hear "pathfinding" I think "shortest path", which is (deterministic) polynomial time (exact class dependant on exactly which variant of the problem, but even Floyd-Warshall is Θ(|V|³)). --- Anyway, no. If you have an NP-hard problem, and you want an exact answer (i.e. you are denying yourself approximate solutions), and you want to so…

> Parallel processing models give you, at best, linear speedup.

Most commonly, yes, though in practice superlinear speedups can occur in some situations. (Not that this negates your overall point, just a nitpick.)

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