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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Topic started by: SysAdmin on October 28, 2012, 11:51:02 PM
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News from Kickstarter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
Project Goals
Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as "a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced". With such a big challenge ahead, we need to make sure that every programmer has access to cheap and open parallel hardware and development tools. Inspired by great hardware communities like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, we see a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing. The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing. If we can pull this off, who knows what kind of breakthrough applications could arise? Maybe some of them will even change the world in some small but positive way.
Read more via the link below.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-hits-kickstarter-goal/
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So they reached their funding goal, eh?
I'm still not clear on the advantages over GPGPU computing that this represents, but the 45GHz description is very misleading.
By this way of adding all the cores together, a Freescale P5040 is an 8.8 to 10 GHz processor. Total BS.
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Democratize parallel computing? That sounds like communist talk.
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Democratize parallel computing? That sounds like communist talk.
...you called?
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I agree. Communism has unnecessarily been given a bad reputation. Vice versa democracy has unnecessarily been given a good reputation.
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I agree. Communism has unnecessarily been given a bad reputation. Vice versa democracy has unnecessarily been given a good reputation.
Mud spelled backwards is dum.
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Mud spelled backwards is dum.
:confused:
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Democratize parallel computing? That sounds like communist talk.
Democracy and communism have never really co-existed and cannot by definition.
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So they reached their funding goal, eh?
I'm still not clear on the advantages over GPGPU computing that this represents, but the 45GHz description is very misleading.
By this way of adding all the cores together, a Freescale P5040 is an 8.8 to 10 GHz processor. Total BS.
The "45GHz" stuff is blatantly misleading, yes, and they've admitted it was a stupid way of describing it.
Though as for what this brings vs. GPGPU: These are 16 totally independent full RISC cores (later 64 cores, eventually they hope to get 1024 to 4096 cores per chip) , rather than SIMD units.
You see the big difference if you try to write code for it that require branches. A typical GPU has a small number of cores with a large number of data streams. So, say a GPU that can handle 16 data streams might "only" be able to handle 4 separate control flows. If you need branches that are taken for individual data streams within one of those cores, usually that means that stream is just "paused" while the rest process the instructions in between.
As such, GPU's are very efficient at handling data streams where you do exactly the same on a large number of sets of data (say, multiple a large number of pixels by the same value, or by values from another bitmap, or whatever), but horribly inefficient when the processing varies significantly for each stream of data. E.g. consider AI's where the decision trees might diverge massively depending on data encountered, or simulations where the data is highly interdependent (e.g. stuff simulated on one core should immediately affect the things on the other cores).
This is the kind of stuff that Adapteva's chips might be exciting for.
Especially if/when they get their higher core-count chips out the door. The 16 core version is frankly mostly interesting for developers to get a taste of the architecture and possible for very low end embedded solution (cell phones...). The performance they've shown with the 16 core version is impressive for a $99 board, but nothing an average desktop wouldn't be able to match or beat.
In architecture this is closer to an XMOS chip than a GPU, though faster clocked cores and a memory architecture that makes it simpler to work with (each core has 32KB in-core static RAM, but can also, subject to timing differences, transparently access the memory of all the other cores and main memory). They're also obviously aiming for a much higher number of cores.
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Democracy and communism have never really co-existed and cannot by definition.
In theory maybe, but in reality democracy is only an idea that looks good on paper but isn't so good when applied. To me it seems communism and democracy have more in common than people would like to admit.
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Thanks Vidarh.
Now Kesa, there has never been a pure democracy and never will be.
And Communism has never been practiced outside of Walden Pond.
Rather, you have either Socialism or a combination of Socialism with Totalitariainism.
Communism as a form of government simply doesn't work on a large or small scale.
For a good example read "Animal Farm".
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There's more to class struggle than just soviet socialism.
On topic, this is a kinda neat project. I guess it's still in the "neat idea" stage, but cool nevertheless. THis does have the "smell" of a kickstarter that may end up being far more difficult to realize than expected.
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Democracy and communism have never really co-existed and cannot by definition.
You must not follow the american electoral cycle :)
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You must not follow the american electoral cycle :)
Hey, we didn't start talking about fiction or facism yet.
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For a good example read "Animal Farm".
Animal Farm was a criticism of Bolchevism and specifically Stalinism, not communism, driven in part by Orwells observations of the Soviet Union, in part by his first hand experience of how the NKVD were quite literally shooting socialists, anarchists and anti-Stalinist communists in the back in Spain during the Spanish Civil War to weed out democratic socialists that might pose a threat to Soviet interests. They were more worried about democratic socialists than about the fascist takeover of Spain...
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In theory maybe, but in reality democracy is only an idea that looks good on paper but isn't so good when applied. To me it seems communism and democracy have more in common than people would like to admit.
They really don't.
That is a pretty stupid comment.
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There's more to class struggle than just soviet socialism.
On topic, this is a kinda neat project. I guess it's still in the "neat idea" stage, but cool nevertheless. THis does have the "smell" of a kickstarter that may end up being far more difficult to realize than expected.
They have working chips, and working boards. The board they are intending to put them on is a design based on a Xilinx reference board that is well understood, so I don't think they'll have any problem with that.
The money is mainly to cover the start-up cost in moving their chip production from a process intended mainly for prototyping (and so ridiculously expensive per chip) to mass production at higher yields to get production costs low enough.
Of course there are risks, but this isn't someone starting with paper and an idea - they are "just" iterating on an existing product.
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They really don't.
That is a pretty stupid comment.
It might seem stupid if you believe the Soviet system had much to do with communism. But not even the Bolcheviks claimed the Soviet Union was communist at any point (and the same holds true for the other "communist" regimes).
The Bolcheviks, prior to the murder of thousands of the remaining communist ideologists, had a long running squabble over whether it would "just" take a few generations or anything up to hundreds of years for the Soviet Union to develop into a communist society, and what efforts would be required to get there one day.
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So they reached their funding goal, eh?
I'm still not clear on the advantages over GPGPU computing that this represents, but the 45GHz description is very misleading.
By this way of adding all the cores together, a Freescale P5040 is an 8.8 to 10 GHz processor. Total BS.
I think thats engineering speed - the possible speed of the chip itself. In the first vid he doesn't really mention it, but Adapteva is a chip manufacturer who claims that their parallel chip is honestly scalar, while the chips made by the AMDs and Intels and Nvidias are only "pseudo" parallel. Or so that is what I can gather from the kickstarter page at least.
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In theory maybe, but in reality democracy is only an idea that looks good on paper but isn't so good when applied. To me it seems communism and democracy have more in common than people would like to admit.
All "isms" only look good on paper.
For any sort of collective to work, it must be kept small, as in tribes or families. Any time an empire is built and the controls stretches too far and the "ism" is supposed to take care of everyone...
...it ceases to function. Always the same.
Bottom line, return to Tribalism before it's too late! ;)
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Regardless of how, I still think there should be more cheap easy to access supercomputers, especially for things like SETI, which needs massive computational
resources running boring repetitive tasks.
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Bottom line, return to Tribalism before it's too late! ;)
Didn't notice that we'd left it, just that the tribes got larger.
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News from Kickstarter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
Trying to save this thread :)
I pledged $120 on Sunday so I am eagerly waiting my dev board which they say is targeted for May next year.
One of the reasons I did do it is because there will be a Xilinx Zynq ARM+FGPA chip on the board. So even if the parallella chip is crap I still have a nice FPGA dev board. Lately I am also into FPGA and the only other way I know for Zynq dev boards is the ZedBoard (http://www.zedboard.org) which is a little more $$.
Will surely need to see what AROS can do on the board.
greets,
Staf.
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Good point Staf,
I forgot about that.
Yeah, that would make it far more useful then I'd consdidered.
Jim
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45 GHz?
Whoah, my bog-standard computer runs 320 GHz by that logic. So what?
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Communism as a form of government simply doesn't work on a large or small scale.
For a good example read "Animal Farm".
Communism is the dissolution of the state, once all class struggles have ceased. It's the utopian end state. Like a perfect democratic society or a perfect free market, it can never be realized, only strived towards.
Until then we have various degrees of socialism, which works at various degrees of success, just like anything else.
(and er... Orwell.. really? He died as a convinced anarchist/socialist)
Will surely need to see what AROS can do on the board.
Something like this could be immensely cool for AROS, for sure. It kinda suits the spirit of AROS too.
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Communism is the dissolution of the state, once all class struggles have ceased. It's the utopian end state. Like a perfect democratic society or a perfect free market, it can never be realized, only strived towards.
Until then we have various degrees of socialism, which works at various degrees of success, just like anything else.
(and er... Orwell.. really? He died as a convinced anarchist/socialist)
Something like this could be immensely cool for AROS, for sure. It kinda suits the spirit of AROS too.
Nope, that's Marxism. Marxism and Communism are very different things.
If you want to see a Marxism based utopia society watch Star Trek.