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Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

kickstarter.com

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Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#11

Post by wcchandler »

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #7

I don't really have any comment on the project itself (not something I would ever use and I don't know the value of what they're proposing). But on purely geek terms this thing seems to warrant a "holy shit": http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e64g401/ Again I don't know how (un)common that sort of thing is but I wasn't expecting to see 64 cores in that tiny form factor. Does anyone here know how cuttin…

I haven't looked at the specs, yet, but this is what I've had in mind: Roll one out to help with deep packet inspection of some of my network traffic. Spam filtering might also be offloaded to one of these guys.

Dedicated machines to host backend applications -- SQL servers, Apache, nginx, etc.

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#12

Post by willvarfar »

I would enjoy making a ray-tracing GPU from one of these.

That the cores don't run in lockstep can be shader heaven! I'm imagining using the cores in a pipeline with zoning so some core 'owns' some tile of the screen and does z-buffering, and other core does clipping of graphics primitives for each tile, and a sea of compute nodes between them chew up work and push it onwards.

Some kind of using the cores as a spatial index too. Passing rays to other cores as they propagate beyond the aabb belonging to a core.

Doubtless it wouldn't work like that. And wouldn't work well. But its fun thinking about it! :)

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#13

Post by willvarfar »

sspiff wrote: post #8

Does anyone know what kind of cores these RISC cores will be? Will it be some lower end ARM version, or MIPS? Will it be something for which a wide array of tooling already exists, or will this have its own custom architecture which only works with their toolchain?

They have the cores and they are custom, if I read the blurb right. They already have the cores!

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#14

Post by tsmarsh »

compilercreator wrote: post #5

I have backed this project. This is an interesting startup, with some good solid technology behind it. They have managed to design and tape out a chip with just a 2m dollar budget so far. The main draw of their architecture is not its peak, but rather its efficiency, both in terms of perf/watt and perf/die area. You can look at their manuals on the site. Hoping their funding drive succeeds. I am liking the fact that…

I'm also a backer and I've been completely surprised by the lack of interest. $99 to try what could represent the future of CPU design. I see it as a platform to really try out if the new wave of concurrent languages really make a difference on these platforms.

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#15

Post by rsneekes »

sspiff wrote: post #8

Does anyone know what kind of cores these RISC cores will be? Will it be some lower end ARM version, or MIPS? Will it be something for which a wide array of tooling already exists, or will this have its own custom architecture which only works with their toolchain?

Architecture reference manual can be found here: http://www.adapteva.com/support/docs/e3-reference-manual/

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#16

Post by Geee »

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #7

I don't really have any comment on the project itself (not something I would ever use and I don't know the value of what they're proposing). But on purely geek terms this thing seems to warrant a "holy shit": http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e64g401/ Again I don't know how (un)common that sort of thing is but I wasn't expecting to see 64 cores in that tiny form factor. Does anyone here know how cuttin…

You'll need this if you want energy-efficiency when solving parallelizable problems. Use one chip in energy-limited systems, like battery-powered robots. Use multiple chips in power/heat-limited systems, like supercomputers.

Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

#17

Post by alexchamberlain »

compilercreator wrote: post #4
nnq wrote: post #2

WTF: "45 GHz of equivalent CPU performance" (though I see the more informative "50 GFLOPS/Watt" below... and I like the prospect of something that would make it cheap to play with large scale real time neural nets...)

Their attempts at marketing talk are indeed very bad, but their technology is pretty interesting.

Very good way of summing it up!
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