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Out of curiosity, how hard is it to program them? Do you need to be proficient with C? or as long as you can understand OpenMPI and such you are good to go? Ho
by saganus 12y ago
Out of curiosity, how hard is it to program them? Do you need to be proficient with C? or as long as you can understand OpenMPI and such you are good to go?
How do you program the FPGA? I' asking this because I have a heavy OO background and even when C is not entirely strange to me, I'm not sure if it's as easy as to make a weekend project with that or not so much.
Your thoughts on this? Did you chain together more than one?
Thanks for your comments!
- wtracy 12y agoRight now you basically need to either use C or OpenCL. (I'm not familiar with OpenPI and Google doesn't pull up anything that seems relevant to this conversation.) If you're not proficient in C, I would recommend the OpenCL route. The crew at Erlang Solutions is working on running Erlang on the Epiphany chip, but I haven't seen any visible progress from them. I can't tell you anything about programming the FPGA. You don't need to directly mess with the FPGA to use the Epiphany. From what I've seen, the jump from C to VHDL is even bigger than the jump from OO to C, so probably not a weekend project. Also, there's no FOSS toolchain for programming the FPGA--you have to use Xilinx's tools, about which I've heard mixed reviews. I bought the cluster with the intention of, well, building a cluster, but to date haven't actually tried that--Real Life got in the way of doing that. I do have all the hardware sitting here to connect them over plain old Ethernet.
- saganus 12y agoSorry, it was my bad. I meant to say OpenMPI :P Thanks for the comments! it certainly gives me some idea of what it would be.
- wtracy 12y agoOkay, OpenMPI will help you with clustering multiple Parallella units to work on the same task. AFAIK it won't run on the Epiphany itself, so you have to look elsewhere for that.