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$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project
- s_henry_paulson 14y agoHopefully not a silly question, but would it make sense to mine bitcoins with something like this, or are GPUs still more effective?
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- NarwhalAttacks 14y agoMy rough guess places it between FPGA implementations and GPU rigs. The only problem is producing the code. FPGAs and (probably) these are harder to manage and set up but will yield better results per dollar and Watt.
- hartror 14y agoGPUs win on hashes per second per dollar. FPGAs win on hashes per joule. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
- EwanToo 14y agoThis has got less floating point calculation power than a single mid-range Intel processor, let alone a high end GPU that people use for bitcoin mining.
- wmf 14y agoBitcoin mining is pure integer, actually.
- rmc 14y agoGPUs have been the only real cost effective way to mine bitcoins for a while now.
- ralph 14y agoSee also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583263 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583263 for comments though it links straight to Kickstarter, and not Ars Technica.
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- ukoki 14y agoSounds good. I have an issue with the "45GHz" claim though - it's kind of like saying your collection of cars can go 2000 mph - you're not actually getting anywhere faster.
- abcd_f 14y agoCar analogy is off. Going from A to B is exactly an example of a task that can't be solved in parallel fashion. On the other hand, if you needed to merely cover N miles, then a pool of cars would work just fine.
- josephlord 14y agoMany computing problems can't be parallelised and in almost all there are dependencies and synchronisation issues that mean a single double speed CPU is almost always better than two normal ones. Exception might be that when a buggy programme gets locked in a tight loop it will only be able to take half the resources. To use another car analogy. Counting clock speed is like counting the cars max RPM instead of actually measuring the performance. And then they have totalled the max RPM figures as if they have have 90,000RPM engine.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoConversely, there are many problems, most notably in the low-level mathematics, which can be parallelised. Matrix multiplication for example...
- josephlord 14y agoYes there are infinitely* many problems that can be parallelised but even in the best case they will only equal the single processor at double the speed. http://home.wlu.edu/~whaleyt/classes/parallel/topics/amdahl.html http://home.wlu.edu/~whaleyt/classes/parallel/topics/amdahl.... I should have referenced Amdahl's law in the previous post but didn't want to misspell it and bother to look it up. *Infinite numbers exist of both parallel and serial computing requirements. Practically there will almost always be additional cost in parallel implementation even if the extra is insignificant such as higher start up cost and coordination for shutdown.
- archangel_one 14y agoUgh. They keep using the term "gigahertz", and it does not mean what they think it means. Having 16 800MHz boards does not mean that you have anything running at 13GHz; it's nonsensical to combine it that way, as any high school science student could tell them. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the product, but it really does put me off it. If they're going to market a product like that it's going to be to a pretty techy crowd and they should get their terminology right.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoWhile I agree that 16x800 Mhz is more accurate than 13 Ghz; I wouldn't say they got the terminology "wrong." A lot of companies are using the combined totals to tell how fast/big/etc something is. It isn't even a recent development either. Just for one example, if you go to Dell's store right now you'll find computers with 8 GB of RAM; but what they fail to tell you is that that is 2x4 GB sticks rather than 1x8 GB stick. So it is actually the "total" RAM in the machine. Now you might argue that for technical reasons there is a difference between how RAM and CPU-cores are exposed to the underlying software, but that within its self is only true in some infrastructural designs, but not true in others (e.g. Sometimes two cores pretend to be one, sometimes a single core pretends to be two).
- bane 14y agoThink of it this way. If I have 1 2-gallon bucket or 2 1-gallon buckets (or 4 half-gallon buckets), I still have 2 gallons of carrying capacity. But if I watch 1 clock for 60 seconds, the amount of time that has passed is exactly the same as if I watch 2 clocks for 60 seconds or 100 clocks for 60 seconds.
- Achshar 14y agoKind of off topic but is there any major performance difference between 8x1 and 2x4 RAMs?
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoThere can be. In particular in some scenarios the 2x4 GB set might be faster, here is why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architectu...
- EwanToo 14y agoIt's just misleading nonsense to call this a supercomputer, with or without the quotes around it. I dug out this article from 2007 about building a 26 gigaflops "supercomputer" called the Microwulf Supercomputer which cost under $2500 [1]. And according to Intel [2], the Intel i5-650 processor can do 25.6 GFLOPs. This is just the worst kind of kickstarter marketing. 1 - http://www.geekologie.com/2007/09/supercomputer-does-26-gigaflop.php http://www.geekologie.com/2007/09/supercomputer-does-26-giga... 2 - http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei5/sb/core_i5-600_d.pdf http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei5/sb/core_...
- bryanlarsen 14y agoThere are GPUs that can do a teraflop, so yes, 26 gigaflops is terribly unimpressive. There are some areas that can't be easily handled by a GPU, but those are mainly bandwidth-limited, which wouldn't be improved by this architecture. The defining feature of this proposal is their 70 gigaflops/watt number, which is impressive. But that doesn't make it a suitable target for hobbyists. Hobbyists who want to play with supercomputing for cheap should just use their existing video card.
- astrodust 14y agoEven a relatively commodity card costing $100 can do 1 teraflop with the higher-end cards already pushing beyond 8 teraflops. The days of a gigaflop being an impressive unit of measurement are surely over.
- swansong 14y agoAbsolutely loving the 4MB jpeg on the homepage. Seriously though, this sounds amazing :)
- icelancer 14y agoInteresting, but a laughably high funding goal. No chance they hit $750k.
- chubot 14y agoI don't get why it has only 1GB of RAM to go with all those cores. Doesn't that drastically limit the potential applications? It doesn't sound like they have compelling applications in mind -- they're kind of throwing it out there to see what people will do with it. But there are only a few things that needs so much computation and so little memory. Even a lot of scientific computing today is more like "big data" than "big compute". Also, it seems obvious that you'll want to use more than one together, so some info about network connectivity would be useful.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoIt is a compute device. I presume the use would be any scenario where you want a very fast, very concurrent, calculation engine but one that doesn't depend on an extremely large data set. One random example I can think of would be cracking encryption and or hashes (without the use of rainbow tables or similar). Your entire comment essentially seems to be "I don't think a usage scenario exists, because I cannot think of any, so why didn't they make it a 'large data' device instead of a compute device?!" which seems more a limitation on yourself than the device its self.
- chubot 14y agoNo, my comment is: what are some of those applications? If your answer is that it's for running quadratic or exponential algorithms on medium-size data sets, then that explains a lot. The relatively few applications explains why they are using Kickstarter for funding. If it had more applications, then people with deep pockets would be falling over themselves to give them money. There's nothing wrong with this -- the page is just so full of marketing-speak that it's hard to tell.
- jlebrech 14y agoSo if those boards have the same performance of an i5 cpu (25GigaFlops) can they be clustered together to reach a higher amount, say would 10 of them produce 450 GigaFlops?
- femto 14y agoHas anyone tried building something about a GreenArray [1]? 144 computers per chip, $20 per chip in with an MOQ of 10. I'm not affiliated with them. It just sounds like an interesting chip, and I'm curious whether there is a reason not to buy some for experimentation. [1] http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/
- norswap 14y ago> The Kickstarter page went live today. A pledge of $99 guarantees supporters a 16-core board by May 2013, while a pledge of $499 guarantees delivery by February. The current hardware is in the prototype phase. sigh There is no guarantee on Kickstarters.
- cgayle 14y agoFor 99$, I would give this a try
- ajdecon 14y agoCalling this a "supercomputer" is a misnomer (though it's a sexy one), because it makes people expect real high performance. As many have pointed out, a single GPU could beat this thing easily in terms of performance. It's really a dev platform for shared-memory parallel computing, mimicking some types of supercomputer architectures... which isn't to say it's not awesome. I've seen similar projects in the distributed-memory space (tiny clusters like Limulus[1], MicroWulf[2], or LittleFe[3]). These things are great for educational purposes, and the low cost makes them a lot of fun for classes and workshops. LittleFe, for example, supports distributed-memory and GPGPU programming and teaches you about clusters, and the educational program at the Supercomputing conference lets some educators build one and take it home for free. But for professional work, I think a workstation-class PC, maybe with a GPU, is always going to win out. [1] http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/ http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/ [2] http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ [3] http://littlefe.net/ http://littlefe.net/
- duskwuff 14y agoLooks like their prototype is based on a Xilinx Zynq dev board from Digilent: https://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=ZEDBOARD https://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=ZEDBOAR... No idea what's hiding on the FMC daughterboard, though.