Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 10, 2013

Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella

Filed under: HPC,Parallel Programming,Parallela,Parallelism,Supercomputing — Patrick Durusau @ 5:29 pm

Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella by Federico Lucifredi.

From the post:

Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that promises to unleash industrial strength parallel processing on the desktop at a rock-bottom price. The Massachusetts-based startup recently ran a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and gained widespread attention only to run into a few roadblocks along the way. Now, with their setbacks behind them, Adapteva is slated to deliver its first units mid-December 2013, with volume shipping in the following months.

What makes the Parallella board so exciting is that it breaks new ground: imagine an Open Source Hardware board, powered by just a few Watts of juice, delivering 90 GFLOPS of number crunching. Combine this with the possibility of clustering multiple boards, and suddenly the picture of an exceedingly affordable desktop supercomputer emerges.

This review looks in-depth at a pre-release prototype board (so-called Generation Zero, a development run of 50 units), giving you a pretty complete overview of what the finished board will look like.

Whether you participate in this aspect of the computing revolution or not, you will be impacted by it.

The more successful Parallela and similar efforts become in bringing desktop supercomputing, the more pressure there will be on cloud computing providers to match those capabilities at lower prices.

Another point of impact will be non-production experimentation with parallel processing. Which may, like Thomas Edison, discover (or re-discover) 10,000 ways that don’t work but discover 1 that far exceeds anyone’s expectations.

That is to say that supercomputing will become cheap enough to tolerate frequent failure while experimenting with it.

What would you like to invent for supercomputing?

August 1, 2013

Parallella is Shipping!

Filed under: Parallel Programming,Parallela — Patrick Durusau @ 2:45 pm

Creating a $99 parallel computing machine is just as hard as it sounds by Jon Brodkin.

From the post:

Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And… they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called “Parallella,” and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013.

As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do. Last week, the company shipped the first 40 Parallellas and says it will ship all 6,300 computers ordered through the Kickstarter by the end of August. Anyone who didn’t back the Kickstarter can now pre-order for delivery in October.

The first version of the board was finished in January, but it cost $150 to produce. “After that it was iterating time after time to get the bill of materials down to something we wouldn’t be losing $50 per board on,” Adapteva CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson told Ars.

Adapteva called Parallella “A Supercomputer For Everyone” in the title of its Kickstarter. Of course, each individual Parallella computer is not a supercomputer in and of itself. But each is capable of the types of parallel computing tasks performed by supercomputers—on a smaller scale—and they can be joined together in Ethernet-connected clusters to create something resembling a supercomputer, Adapteva says.

(…)

Parallella is open source hardware, meaning Adapteva released all the details about the components to the public. Board design files are on GitHub, for example. Theoretically, companies besides Adapteva could build Parallella computers.

See the post for details but there is a higher priced 64-bit chip as well.

Thoughts about parallel processing of topic maps?

April 18, 2013

Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer

Filed under: Linux OS,Parallel Programming,Parallela,Parallelism — Patrick Durusau @ 1:23 pm

Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

From the post:

What Adapteva has done is create a credit-card sized parallel-processing board. This comes with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Multicore Accelerator chip, along with 1GB of RAM, a microSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, and an HDMI connection. If all goes well, by itself, this board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or — in terms PC users understand — about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU.

This board will use Ubuntu Linux 12.04 for its operating system. To put all this to work, the platform reference design and drivers are now available.

From Adapteva.

I wonder which will come first:

A really kick-ass 12 dimensional version of Asteroids?

or

New approaches to graph processing?

What do you think?

Powered by WordPress