5 ms·

Parallella 'supercomputers' headed to early backers

36 points by SonicSoul 13y ago

rjsw 13y ago
The boards also look to be really good value as an FPGA development platform with 32-bit RAM, USB, Ethernet and HDMI.
- 3amOpsGuy 13y ago
  I agree, it's one of the factors that tipped me into pre-ordering (no word on my delivery yet though!) There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-) Still the most interesting bit of hardware to come down the pipe yet.
  - ZenoArrow 13y ago
    "There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-)" Depends on whether you'd like to use the Epiphany chip or not, as the FPGA logic used to interface with the Epiphany can be used for your own projects too (albeit with the catch that you lose the ability to access the full potential of the Epiphany chip). I'd be interested in using the Parallella board as a cheap Zynq dev board.
    - jrn 13y ago
      I think the hdmi implementation takes up most of the fpga, the epiphany interface footprint is quite small.
      - ZenoArrow 13y ago
        Good to know. I'm surprised they've gone down that route, suppose they're got to cut costs somewhere.
melling 13y ago
I remember that the early comments were pretty negative on the Parallella. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985 http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/ http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel... How does the product rate now that it's finished? I bought one and I think it should be shipping in the next week or two. My feeling was that good or bad, supporting the Kickstarter campaign might help spur the industry just a tad bit faster. We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers. We need better languages and paradigms to explore them. The increase in FP and actors/CSP model use might help, but developers still need to learn how to use these tools effectively.
- wmf 13y ago
  AFAIK they still haven't shown any benchmarks where their chip beats a similar-sized GPU (e.g. Temash). It still looks like faith-based computer architecture.
dkhenry 13y ago
I am super excited about getting my board. Not because its some amazing piece of kit ( GPU's are currently better), but I think their architecture will be awesome if they can scale it up.
graue 13y ago
Has there been any news about running Erlang on one? I remembered seeing blog posts about it, but when I went back and looked, both were "coming soon" posts with no code. I'm one of the backers, and honestly have no idea how I'll use the thing, but Erlang support would at least be cool to play with.
- ZenoArrow 13y ago
  Probably the best place to keep track of Parallella development is on the forums. There is a Erlang subforum there too, though no news of an Erlang build that makes use of the Epiphany yet AFAIK... http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f220f2b6aa82423b85c413e2c http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f...

36 points by SonicSoul 13y ago

rjsw 13y ago

The boards also look to be really good value as an FPGA development platform with 32-bit RAM, USB, Ethernet and HDMI.

3amOpsGuy 13y ago
I agree, it's one of the factors that tipped me into pre-ordering (no word on my delivery yet though!) There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-) Still the most interesting bit of hardware to come down the pipe yet.
- ZenoArrow 13y ago
  "There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-)" Depends on whether you'd like to use the Epiphany chip or not, as the FPGA logic used to interface with the Epiphany can be used for your own projects too (albeit with the catch that you lose the ability to access the full potential of the Epiphany chip). I'd be interested in using the Parallella board as a cheap Zynq dev board.
  - jrn 13y ago
    I think the hdmi implementation takes up most of the fpga, the epiphany interface footprint is quite small.
    - ZenoArrow 13y ago
      Good to know. I'm surprised they've gone down that route, suppose they're got to cut costs somewhere.

melling 13y ago

I remember that the early comments were pretty negative on the Parallella. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985 http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/ http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel... How does the product rate now that it's finished? I bought one and I think it should be shipping in the next week or two. My feeling was that good or bad, supporting the Kickstarter campaign might help spur the industry just a tad bit faster. We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.

pjmlp 13y ago
> We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers. We need better languages and paradigms to explore them. The increase in FP and actors/CSP model use might help, but developers still need to learn how to use these tools effectively.
wmf 13y ago
AFAIK they still haven't shown any benchmarks where their chip beats a similar-sized GPU (e.g. Temash). It still looks like faith-based computer architecture.

dkhenry 13y ago

I am super excited about getting my board. Not because its some amazing piece of kit ( GPU's are currently better), but I think their architecture will be awesome if they can scale it up.

graue 13y ago

Has there been any news about running Erlang on one? I remembered seeing blog posts about it, but when I went back and looked, both were "coming soon" posts with no code. I'm one of the backers, and honestly have no idea how I'll use the thing, but Erlang support would at least be cool to play with.

ZenoArrow 13y ago
Probably the best place to keep track of Parallella development is on the forums. There is a Erlang subforum there too, though no news of an Erlang build that makes use of the Epiphany yet AFAIK... http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f220f2b6aa82423b85c413e2c http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f...