21–30 of 34 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 o…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
This is a little bit of a straw man. As Jack Dongarra will happily tell you, an iPad can outperform some of the supercomputers from the beginning of the Top500 benchmark. You don't get to be a supercomputer today by beating supercomputers from two decades ago, that's not how technology works. I'm taking umbrage at the linkbait title because I'm a grumpy old man, not because I don't think this project isn't cool (and…
And while this thing doesn't really meet that label at its present scale, it is conceptually far closer to those early supercomputers than what an iPad is, both in how it's structured, the parallel nature of it (16 ARM cores; 128 Epiphany cores), the shared memory (within each Parallella) etc..
So yes, you're being grumpy about a title where it takes about 10 seconds to figure out that this isn't actually about someone building stuff aiming for the Top500.
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.
Units have been known to overheat with just passive cooling, and they even advise that you install a fan with the official case (that they sell on their store/provided to backers), even though there is nowhere to screw a fan in, etc.
Cases and Cooling: http://www.parallella.org/2014/04/30/cases-and-cooling/ (parallella.org) April 30, 2014
The point that a cluster of parallellas is relatively easy to cool is definitely aided by the form factor.
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?
Here's some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702456 In terms of raw GFLOPS, you shouldn't. Parallela offers something halfway between a multi-CPU cluster, differing in terms of memory access, and a GPU, differing in that each core is a real core and can be independently making calls, branching, etc. Another point to note is that every GPU architecture is different and that some support a dif…
Between ARM, OpenPower and Intel's Phi successors this is becoming a hyper-competitive space. Interesting times ahead!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a little bit of a straw man. As Jack Dongarra will happily tell you, an iPad can outperform some of the supercomputers from the beginning of the Top500 benchmark. You don't get to be a supercomputer today by beating supercomputers from two decades ago, that's not how technology works. I'm taking umbrage at the linkbait title because I'm a grumpy old man, not because I don't think this project isn't cool (and…
My point is that the "super computer" term in itself is quite meaningless. It's pretty much just saying "we thought this thing was fast when it came out". And while this thing doesn't really meet that label at its present scale, it is conceptually far closer to those early supercomputers than what an iPad is, both in how it's structured, the parallel nature of it (16 ARM cores; 128 Epiphany cores), the shared memory…
The Parallella brings distributed-memory programming in, which is a very important development.
You and I strongly disagree on the meaningfulness or definition of the term supercomputer. Here's an easy definition: A supercomputer is any single, unified, computer system that is currently one of the fastest 500 in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that the "super computer" term in itself is quite meaningless. It's pretty much just saying "we thought this thing was fast when it came out". And while this thing doesn't really meet that label at its present scale, it is conceptually far closer to those early supercomputers than what an iPad is, both in how it's structured, the parallel nature of it (16 ARM cores; 128 Epiphany cores), the shared memory…
An iPad does resemble the supercomputers of yore, between its superscalar, vector processing (GPU), and multicore architecture. The Parallella brings distributed-memory programming in, which is a very important development. You and I strongly disagree on the meaningfulness or definition of the term supercomputer. Here's an easy definition: A supercomputer is any single, unified, computer system that is currently one…
I think the metric of it being one of the fastest 500 in the world is a little disingenuous to all of the other supercomputers out there.