While I am happy to see another post for this on the front page, I would have preferred a positive post. People jump on bandwagons I would rather we started a positive bandwagon rather then one looking to find the shovels and a decent grave for a awesome project
Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#32If the current trend rate continues, they should be able to reach their goal. If they could somehow get on the Reddit front page it would easily happen. I think there are many who might be interested if they only knew.
Here is the trend graph: http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#33Argh! I get paid in a couple of days! I was hoping the cash would go into my account before this runs out. Looks like that might not happen now....
Why couldn't you have given us another few days?
Oh well. I bet it'll get funded.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#34> we see a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform > FAQ: Will you open source the Epiphany chips? > Not initially, but it may be considered in the future. Well, that makes it a lot less interesting than I hoped it would be.
You were hoping for what exactly? VHDL/Verilog for the chips? Netlists?
For most people I'd assume the main thing is that the architecture is well documented and open, as well as the board, and they have released all of the architecture documentation and a lot of other material.
As much as it'd be great to have a market in other sources for the chips, unless/until the architecture has some traction that is pretty irrelevant.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#35Several commenters and the OP, seem to think that this Kickstarter will fail. Having backed quite few Kickstarter campaigns, and watched a lot more, this seems unlikely. Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed. It seems that many people delay backing till the last minute…
And no big project like this would ever fail by Does Kickstarter explicitly prohibit such things?
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not so much that it's a powerful computer, but a computer architecture that can scale up to be a very powerful system. The version they're trying to fund is a cost reduced version including their 16 core chip. They also have a 64 core chip, and plan to scale it much higher. It's differentiated from GPU's in that each core is a simple but fully independent CPU core, with direct access to main system memory AND to…
How is it different from Tilera and Intel's Xeon Phi?
I've not had the time to read up on Xeon Phi, but compared to the Tilera, the Epiphany is a considerably simpler processor. There's no MMU in the cores, instead of caches there is direct DMA control, and the on-chip network extends past the edges of the chip (that's all the I/O, there are no peripherals in the chip). It all adds up to something you can scale by mounting more of them on a board, assuming your task is sufficiently adaptable to a data flow (since the external bandwidth scales slower than the number of cores). It's not at a level where you can run a general purpose operating system with virtual memory and memory protection (though extending it for that would be fairly easy - perhaps Epiphany V?), nor does it (currently) run multiple threads per core, but this simplicity affords it a much lower power expense.
A GPU may be more similar, as those tend to have prefetch operations and no memory protection, but they are designed to have huge bunches of threads doing the exact same type of work. They look like vector processors handling between 16 and 128 identical operations per control core (each a multiprocessor). Mainly the Epiphany is easier to program, but optimization is a different story (similar to place and route processes FPGAs need).
It's a move toward a data and control flow granularity currently not available at a price for individuals. And to make it more useful, those individuals need to try things.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#37While I am happy to see another post for this on the front page, I would have preferred a positive post. People jump on bandwagons I would rather we started a positive bandwagon rather then one looking to find the shovels and a decent grave for a awesome project
For what it's worth, this is the first I've heard of it, and this convinced me to contribute.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#38I seem to recall repeatedly reading that Kickstarter projects collect he majority of their funding in the first 72 and final 24 hours.
My anecdotal experience backing and following half a dozen projects agrees with this.
I'd be quite surprised if this project doesn't make it.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#39Could someone explain how this is different from GPU computing and regular multi-core CPU computing? I realize there is a difference...but I'm not quite sure I grasp it yet. GPU computing is a lot of parallel math computations with limited shared memory. I'm assuming the Epiphany CPU is more capable than the simple GPU math units? How's it different from multi-core CPUs? Just the sheer quantity of cores they have pac…
IMO this combines some of the worse features of Cell (e.g. local memory and DMA) and GPUs, and while the power efficiency is good the absolute performance is very low. For a parallel noob who's using OpenMP/OpenCL I don't think it's any better than a desktop PC because programming it is going to feel the same and performance is going to be equal or lower. And if you don't use the libraries then you're in low-level ninjas-only land — the extremely simple and flexible hardware is good in theory because you can use it many different ways, but it also doesn't help you or give any hints about how to properly exploit it.
Re: Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying
#40I think the market is telling these guys: We don't care about computing power. People are getting by with iPads and Chromebooks powered by ARM cores with 1/8 the computing power of an Intel processor. Don't get me wrong if you want to play around with parallel computing you should love this, and support it. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't reach Pebble funding levels.
They're actually providing much less computing power than even a low-end PC.