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$99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware
- elviejo 13y agoI think if they had opensourced this from the beginning their kickstarter campaign would have been even more of a success
- TallGuyShort 13y agoI don't think that would have had much of an effect on their fundraising. The boards design was not close to completion at the time, and the funds were actually used to build the prototypes that enabled them to get this far. They've been really transparent and open, but I would agree that would have perhaps saved themselves some work by letting the community find and troubleshoot bugs earlier.
- drone 13y agoThey were at OHS talking about how they were going to open-source it when ready for production, and their kickstarter even said "All board design files will be provided as open source once the Parallella boards are released."
- comex 13y agoThey haven't actually published the design/source files for the coprocessor itself, have they?
- drone 13y agoI don't think they will. I'm not sure if the VHDL would contain any proprietary IP from them or others, but I spoke with their CEO at OHS last year, and he indicated that open-sourcing the processor its self was out of their reach. I didn't push further, but I could imagine there were IP issues involved in doing so. Most certainly, the actual chip design will include a lot of 3rd party IP - I'm not sure they would want to create new transistor designs, etc. when those can easily be licensed from the fab company.
- VLM 13y agoSlightly off topic, but when I saw the power distribution bus with nine different outputs for this tiny little thing, I contemplated that we've come a long way from when I was a kid and everything ran off a single 5 volt ttl bus. It seems the more people say analog is dead, and thats all I've heard my entire life, the more you actually need analog EEs.
- eksith 13y agoAs long as analog sources exist, there will be analog EE ;)
- akiselev 13y agoHigh speed digital (hundreds of MHz+ signals) is a lot closer to analog/RF electronics than to the TTL digital you're used to.
- daeken 13y agoCould you elaborate on that? High-speed hardware interests the hell out of me, but I don't have any hands-on experience there. Any books or exercises you could recommend?
- akiselev 13y agoUnfortunately I learned EE as an apprentice with no books but I've heard High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic [1] is good. Understanding why high speed is more like RF and analog electronics has a lot to do with impedance, which is the "resistance" of a material to a change in current at a specific frequency. Ohm's law is impedance at 0hz (DC current) but it gets a lot more complicated when you have a 133 Mhz bus because now the signal is changing fast enough that a lot of interesting effects start to pop up. For example, the capacitance of the PCB has a significant effect on rise times, your trace lengths have to be within 1/20th of the wavelength of the signal of each other or the bits might arrive at different times, you have to start worrying about other Mhz+ noise from the power supply based solely on the location of traces (hence you have to place filter/bypass caps more carefully), you have to worry about mismatched impedances (the "resistance" @ 133 mhz is different between the trace and a pin or something) or else you'll have a lot of energy "reflected" back at the signal source, adding interference patterns, etc. You never really see any of this in hobbyist electronics unless you have a really long cable for Khz signals or are trying to use something like SPI at 100Mhz. Once you start dealing with high end ARM chips, DSPs, DDR2-3, PCI[e], gigabit ethernet, HDMI, these traces become very prevalent. However the beauty of digital is that you don't really have to understand all of the analog that goes behind it. There are a lot of simple engineering rules that make it very difficult to mess up a high speed digital design (at least in my experience). If you have a tool like Altium, managing all the impedances, trace widths and lengths, differential pairs becomes a cake walk. If you know what an error looks like in an oscilloscope (whether its a rise time problem, reflection problem, etc) then you'll find it easy to work in the field. Then there's actual RF engineering, which is a whole other story (digital signals are rarely more than the mW range, RF engineering also goes beyond that into W-KW-MW range). [1] http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241 http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...
- randall 13y agoWould this be a good fit for something like video processing? Could you use the GPIO pins to actually have a video input, and then send it out via HDMI?
- zhemao 13y agoShould be possible. Just attach some RCA jacks to the GPIO pins and use the FPGA to do some pre-processing before sending it to the CPU. Not sure what the performance would be like, though.
- jacobparker 13y agoUrg. Off-topic: This blog uses Javascript to "inject" text into what you copy ("Read more: http://..." http://...") (search Google for how this is done.) This is such an extremely annoying and ultimately pointless practice. EDIT: apparently many sites use an external service for this, and you can easily block them from /etc/hosts http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks
- eksith 13y agoIt does? I tried copying text on the page as well as the URL and didn't notice anything. As far as I know, this isn't possible in pure JS; you need Flash. It's a security issue. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/400212/how-to-copy-to-the-clipboard-in-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/400212/how-to-copy-to-the...
- jacobparker 13y agoI don't have flash installed. You can't cause a copy with Javascript but you have control over what gets copied - this is important for making custom widgety things but it is being used here for evil. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/element.oncopy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/element.onc... Here is a blog post, with a solution at the bottom that works for the blog: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks
- eksith 13y agoI see. That's... quite clever and dastardly. Maybe I wasn't affected because I use a modified hosts file : http://www.winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://www.winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm Although, I changed 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0 for a marginal gain in speed (also I test a local server sometimes and get served my test page instead of ads). And took out some services I actually use.
- jacobparker 13y ago
- Osmium 13y agoThis sounds really interesting, but does anyone know how useful it is in practice? 90 GFLOPS doesn't seem that high compared to e.g. high end i7s, though I imagine there's a lot of variability in how that's actually calculated. Also, if it is as fast as claimed, surely 1GB of memory would be a large limiting factor?
- akiselev 13y agoIf I remember correctly, my Xeon E7-8870 server pulled at most 100 GFLOPS double precision. I think high end i7s max out at about 180 GFLOPS single precision. Considering relative costs (and the scale the 64 core can reach) this is really really cheap per GFLOP, both in power and cost. (E7-8870 is 100W and like $4000).
- osivertsson 13y ago...but I can buy an off the shelf $200 GPU (e.g. Nvidia 660) with stable tools that will work pretty good with highly parallel tasks, and get ~2000 GFLOPS according to [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series Or is there workloads where the parallella actually would make sense? Power requirements are low, but development environment is probably rough, and development costs (regardless of stack) are going to be order of magnitudes higher than your electricity bill anyway for most projects.
- akiselev 13y agoConsidering the Z7000 series FPGA, yes there are many use cases where this is much better than any Cpu or GPU. it's a really uncommon use case though, and the best use for this board is probably as a developer board for ASICs with ARM IP cores. The benefit of the FPGA, though is that you can use it to add whatever peripherals or even coprocessors you want for your specialized application. It would be awesome to see a 10gbit fiber optic Phy on it.
- zhemao 13y ago
- ChuckMcM 13y agoVery interesting. This is even less expensive than the Zedboard and it has the multi-core unit as well. I think the Zynq is pretty awesome but man, I don't think Xilinx could have made using it any more complicated if they tried!
- dfc 13y agoThe parallella + john the ripper google SoC project sounds neat: http://www.parallella.org/2013/06/12/google-summer-of-code-projects-with-openwall/ http://www.parallella.org/2013/06/12/google-summer-of-code-p... I have an old 65k+ passwd file that I have always wanted to get to 100% cracked paaswords (purely for sentimental reasons.) Unfortunately I bet that implementing DES is not a huge priority.
- wmf 13y agoAFAIK, Radeons should be much better for password cracking than Parallella.
- dfc 13y agoIncluding power considerations? This is an ancient 10+ year old passwd file that I spent a lot of time working on cracking for grad school. I got ~2/3 of the accounts. I figure that number includes most of the human generated passwords and a couple versions of the "randomly generated passwords." I have always been curious what the story was behind the remaining third. But I'm not curious enough to devote many resources to it.
- cottonseed 13y agoI don't understand electronics component pricing. The entry level board cost $99, but the cheapest Zynq-7 costs over $100 (Octopart)? Or maybe it's just Xilinx. How does Adapteva manage these prices?
- cnxsoft 13y agoThey build several thousands so they get cheaper components prices. Yet it's still surprising they can get it that much cheaper. Edit: Zynq-7010 is just about $55 in DigiKey.
- zw123456 13y agoIf they have not done so already, low latency traders should be all over this thing. Much easier than trying to do it with just FPGA's.