Parellella - $99 super computer on Kickstarter

[vcoleiro1]

Saw this supposed $99 super computer on Kickstarter


Perhaps someone can give me there take on what exactly it is


Check it here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/?ref=kicktraq

 

[Foxgod]

Saw this supposed $99 super computer on Kickstarter


Perhaps someone can give me there take on what exactly it is


Check it here: http://www.kickstart...e/?ref=kicktraq

Sounds like a cheap solution to get yourself a small sized super calculator.


Its specifically designed to crunch numbers, from the looks of it.


It can be used for research, but not for general computing.

 

[Trip]

It can be used for research, but not for general computing.

Can't see why not since they have Ubuntu running on it.


"Ships with Ubuntu OS"


I've seen this problem with a lot of Kickstarter projects, they don't explain enough to non-techie people or offer everyday usage scenarios. Seems strange when they're supposed to be getting people to back them.

 

[Zip]

99$≠supercomputer

 

[Foxgod]

It can be used for research, but not for general computing.

Can't see why not since they have Ubuntu running on it.


"Ships with Ubuntu OS"


I've seen this problem with a lot of Kickstarter projects, they don't explain enough to non-techie people or offer everyday usage scenarios. Seems strange when they're supposed to be getting people to back them.

Because this thing is designed for single floating points operations, and not double floating points, it also lacks video acceralation, its really not for games.


Its great for folding@home tho.

 

[mjohansson]

It might be able to raytrace in some resolution, I want one!

 

[vcoleiro1]

I assume there will be a GPU on the dual core soc that it has. Perhaps some of the other cores could also be used for graphics computation.


Also, I found this link which gives some detail on what it's intended uses could be: http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/e16g301/


Uses include video transcoding, computational photography etc etc

 

[WizardStan]

Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as "a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced"

[citation needed]

 

[WizardStan]

Can't see why not since they have Ubuntu running on it.

It has a general purpose CPU, but it's true power is in this "Epiphany Multicore Accelerator". You need a CPU and an OS to drive it, but then you offload these heavy calculations to the accelerator. It's kind of like how the Pandora has the DSP, if the DSP were a selling feature that had been made working from the start and accounted for half the cost of the device. Just like the DSP, if a program isn't designed to use it then it is just wasted space and money.


Don't see much information about the SoC they are going to put into it, but it's unlikely to be any sort of powerful beast, it's really just there to run the OS, drive the Epiphany processors, and spit out the results, as near as I can tell.

 

[monstercameron]

I found a company that makes multicore DSP chips...256 core...hey guys check out this artivcle on my blog blog.thinkteletronics.com/?p=399

 

[Exophase]

I found a company that makes multicore DSP chips...256 core...hey guys check out this artivcle on my blog blog.thinkteletronics.com/?p=399

Yes, everyone's doing it and everyone thinks it'll be a big hit. See Ziilabs ZMS series and Tilera for two more blatant examples of close to the same thing.


All of it is the same solution looking for a problem - a bunch of fully MIMD cores instead of a big SIMD array like a GPU that trumps it in total computational power.

 

[elwing]

Am I the only one to remark that while lot of people speaks about 64 additional cores, you need either to pay 5000$ or pay 199$ and hope they'll reach a 3M$ stretch goal to get a 64core one, otherwise you'll only get some 16cores ones?

 

[Exophase]

Am I the only one to remark that while lot of people speaks about 64 additional cores, you need either to pay 5000$ or pay 199$ and hope they'll reach a 3M$ stretch goal to get a 64core one, otherwise you'll only get some 16cores ones?

No, but during the three times I tried writing my original responses Firefox crashed for some reason, thanks to their performance comparison video (and no I've never had problems with youtube crashing Firefox.. but that video was just so many kinds of awful it doesn't surprise me that it'd kill everything it touches). Eventually I gave up.


The 16 core chip is actually not even that great in peak performance, never mind useful performance..

 

[monstercameron]

I think the arm chip it is being paired with is the xilinx zync series, which doesn't have a gpu but has intgrated fpga fabric

 

[Exophase]

Parallela has opened the documentation on their website, kudos for taking the initiative in really going open like they said they would. The thing consists of a bunch of really bog-standard RISC cores - think something in between a Cortex-M4 and a Cortex-A7, but without any of the stuff that makes the ARM ISA interesting. The only real innovation here is the memory interconnect.

 

[mono]

hum... I prefer Craigs videos ^_^ ... So I will stick to the Pandora

 

[vcoleiro1]

Parallella just got Funded.


Check it: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone

 

[WizardStan]

4145 people are going to be disappointed. One person is quite happy and has an actual use for this.

 

[monstercameron]

they seriously pulled a last minute win out of their a$$...

 

[monstercameron]

Parallela has opened the documentation on their website, kudos for taking the initiative in really going open like they said they would. The thing consists of a bunch of really bog-standard RISC cores - think something in between a Cortex-M4 and a Cortex-A7, but without any of the stuff that makes the ARM ISA interesting. The only real innovation here is the memory interconnect.

what kind of software can you run on this...the epiphany 3 has ~24Gflops of compute perf...can it do graphics ?