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I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

parallella.org

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Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#11

Post by illumen »

supermatt wrote: post #3

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

For the experience building it mainly I guess. The author also mentions machine learning and image processing. Doing multiple different tasks at once. Which I think is possible with the latest CUDA and Nvidia gear though.

It has 8 FPGAs on there too. Useful for highspeed IO and other tasks. Also, there are 8 HDMI outputs on there. Which would make this a pretty interesting video wall machine.

If it had the 64 core chips instead of the 16 core chips, this thing would be ~ 800 GFLOPS I guess.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#13

Post by rasz_pl »

supermatt wrote: post #3

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

Its like gardening. No point really, other than hobby.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#14

Post by hunt »

JTon wrote: post #9
hunt wrote: post #7

I can see one fan at the top of the cylinder- is only one fan really sufficient? It looks like this would generate a large amount of heat. I would be quite interested to see the temperatures this gets up to.

It's a pretty big fan. Also, the cylindrical design certainly helps airflow

The design of it certainly helps- I imagine that the switch will get warm on its own. Attaching boards to that must surely make a lot of heat.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#15

Post by vidarh »

supermatt wrote: post #3

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

The Parallella is a testbed for their chips, to let people experiment with the platform. The real value is for embedded use (of the chips, not the whole current design), and as they scale up the chips - their roadmap is for chips with thousands of cores.

Compared with your GPU, there's also another important factor: These are entirely independent cores. For stuff that your GPU does well - that is, stuff where you're doing the exact same manipulation of a large number of values in parallel - it's likely to keep beating the epiphany chips. For stuff it doesn't do well, that is, stuff where you need indpendent threads of execution for each data stream, the Epiphany chips may become a better fit.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#16

Post by angersock »

rasz_pl wrote: post #13
supermatt wrote: post #3

Having read through the documents, I see that it is capable of ~200 GFLOPS. Obviously, this outshines my macbook performance of ~50GFLOPS, but it is substantially less than my workstations GPU, an Nvidia GTX 770, capable of ~3000 GFLOPS. I suppose my question is why would I choose to build something like this over using a GPU?

Its like gardening. No point really, other than hobby.

But when I'm gardening, I prefer to see bugs. It means everything is healthy and happy. :(

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#17

Post by onalark »

This is a misleading title. Brian builds Supercomputer Models, not Supercomputers. It would be like if I had a model of a Ferrari I put together at home and wrote an article about how I built sports cars in my spare time.

Yes, these are awesome, full-featured models, but the differences between this and a supercomputer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, requires high-density power and cooling, features multi-dimensional, low-diameter networks, and contains hundreds of thousands to millions of compute cores is... quite vast.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#18

Post by vidarh »

hunt wrote: post #7

I can see one fan at the top of the cylinder- is only one fan really sufficient? It looks like this would generate a large amount of heat. I would be quite interested to see the temperatures this gets up to.

A single 16 core Parallella can run with just passive cooling. It takes next to no cooling to bring both the ARM and Epiphany chips down to near room temperature.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#19

Post by poulson »

onalark wrote: post #17

This is a misleading title. Brian builds Supercomputer Models, not Supercomputers. It would be like if I had a model of a Ferrari I put together at home and wrote an article about how I built sports cars in my spare time. Yes, these are awesome, full-featured models, but the differences between this and a supercomputer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, requires high-density power and cooling, features multi-d…

Or, "Brian builds distributed-memory computers". Despite the misleading title, I think such a project would be a great tool for a parallel computing class. Such a machine would be roughly the same cost as a textbook and would be much more rewarding than running MPI on a multicore laptop/desktop.

Re: I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time

#20

Post by vidarh »

onalark wrote: post #17

This is a misleading title. Brian builds Supercomputer Models, not Supercomputers. It would be like if I had a model of a Ferrari I put together at home and wrote an article about how I built sports cars in my spare time. Yes, these are awesome, full-featured models, but the differences between this and a supercomputer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, requires high-density power and cooling, features multi-d…

I get what you are saying, but what is a supercomputer today is a pedestrian little home computer tomorrow.

The cylinder design he's using is inspired by the early Cray models. Cray 1 had a performance of 80 MFLOPS. Cray X-MP had a performance of 800 MFLOPS. The Cray 2 (which looked substantially different) reached 1.9 GFLOPS in 1985.

1993-1996, Numerical Wind Tunnel - a 140 CPU vector computer, was at the top most of the time. It reached it's all time peak at around 235.8 GFLOP/s

Even ASCII Red, which held the top spot until the end of the 20th century, only reached 1.3 TFLOPS.

So unlike if you built a model of a Ferrari at home, this thing actually substantially outperforms the fastest supercomputers up until the mid 90's.

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