6 ms·

Erlang-OTP and the Parallella Board

59 points by shepardrtc 11y ago

wmf 11y ago
Am I reading it right that Erlang does not run on the Parallela chip?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ZoF 11y ago
  Could you state this in a different way? I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask.
  - unoti 11y ago
    Erlang itself runs on the dual core ARM chip. There are Native Implemented Functions (NIF's) that can do things on the Parallela cores, but those functions are not Erlang. Or, more succinctly, don't get this thinking you're getting a 16 core Erlang node, not exactly.
    - hlieberman 11y ago
      Considering the Parallela cores are pretty basic RISC processors anyway and have a ton of shared memory, you probably don't want to treat them as regular Erlang nodes regardless. Still, this is hardly a "drop-in" scale kind of thing. It's more like... having an FPGA with some nice glue you can call out to.
- fenollp 11y ago
  Yup. It runs on the ARM host and you have to use those NIFs to explicitly make use of the Epiphany coprocessor AFAICT
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Nice. One thing about Erlang/OTP has always been the fact that it is rather bound to the confines of its own VM, and has never been popular as a language for interacting with the host OS on a very deep level, instead it's the VM itself that you overwhelmingly use as your platform. Though you have mechanisms like port drivers and NIFs to interact with the outside world, they don't seem to have been very popular for doing systems programming or using low-level POSIX interfaces, even if there is some work on that front. It'd be interesting to exploit Erlang's unique properties in building lower level OS infrastructure. I should probably play around with some of the bindings that have been written one day. Also worth checking out is the Nerves Project, a buildroot-based embedded Erlang distribution: http://nerves-project.org/ http://nerves-project.org/
andyl 11y ago
I loved the vision of Erlang on Parallella, but after a bunch of tries did not have any success. Would still love to see it work, but in the meantime have had good experience with Erlang/Elixir on RaspberryPi2. RPi2 has a Quad-core CPU and costs $35 - easy to put together a cluster. Runs standard Erlang - simple to experiment with concurrent programming. Built a web-service that delivers 100's of pages per second on a single device - low memory usage - just great.
- tchvil 11y ago
  Did you use Phoenix on the Pi?
  - andyl 11y ago
    yes
Quequau 11y ago
This is really nice to see... but I have admit I'm really disappointed with how the Parallella has turned out. The 64 core version of the board never shipped in quantity and has apparently been abandoned. There still isn't a practical way to connect them beyond the networking provided by the ARM processor. Lastly, there isn't a lower cost revision of the board intended to use in clusters, which is a shame because it's that ARM/FPGA chip that represents the bulk of the cost & heat of the Parallella board. I love the idea and for the most part the community seemed like reasonable folks... it's just that the Adapteva folks were never really able to deliver on the promises made in the original kickstarter and so the whole ecosystem pretty much stagnated. This morning I read an article about a new many core project using the 64 bit ARMv8 which is supposedly going to be a topic for a talk at this year's Hot Chips... http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/phytium-to-detail-64-core-armv8-a-processor-for-hpc-in-august/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/phytium-t...
- vidarh 11y ago
  I don't feel they failed to deliver on the promises in the Kickstarter campaign, and while it's disappointing to not yet see more on the 64-core version that was a long shot. However, they got a decent capital infusion last year so hopefully we'll get to see something more come out of that. It's not that surprising that the community is moving slowly: They've shipped something not that far above 10,000 boards, many of which are likely in the hands of Kickstarters backers that bought them because we liked the idea more than because we have time to do all that much with them. They need another iteration and another magnitude increase in community size, really.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    People getting developer kits and doing nothing with them I reckon is a common enough problem that could be addressed simply by setting up a market place for people who got a device to sell to someone who might do something with it. For example, I bought an Oculus DK2. I've pretty much not done anything with it because I didn't realize at the time how much computing power I needed to really have fun with the DK2. When I received it and tried it out with my MacBook Pro, I was like "this is really cool and I'd love to play with this more, but I'm not shelling out at least a couple of hundred if not almost a thousand dollars for a desktop with a reasonably powerful GPU that would make the Oculus fun to play with. LeapMotion was another device where I knew several people that had pre-ordered one and ended up doing nothing with it. One of my colleagues has had a Myo sitting on her desk practically unused. Companies making hardware for developers need to find a way to figure out who is actively working with their devices and contact those that are not to let them know that there is a way to sell their unused devices to someone else who might want to develop for it.

59 points by shepardrtc 11y ago

wmf 11y ago

Am I reading it right that Erlang does not run on the Parallela chip?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ZoF 11y ago
Could you state this in a different way? I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask.
- unoti 11y ago
  Erlang itself runs on the dual core ARM chip. There are Native Implemented Functions (NIF's) that can do things on the Parallela cores, but those functions are not Erlang. Or, more succinctly, don't get this thinking you're getting a 16 core Erlang node, not exactly.
  - hlieberman 11y ago
    Considering the Parallela cores are pretty basic RISC processors anyway and have a ton of shared memory, you probably don't want to treat them as regular Erlang nodes regardless. Still, this is hardly a "drop-in" scale kind of thing. It's more like... having an FPGA with some nice glue you can call out to.
fenollp 11y ago
Yup. It runs on the ARM host and you have to use those NIFs to explicitly make use of the Epiphany coprocessor AFAICT

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Nice. One thing about Erlang/OTP has always been the fact that it is rather bound to the confines of its own VM, and has never been popular as a language for interacting with the host OS on a very deep level, instead it's the VM itself that you overwhelmingly use as your platform. Though you have mechanisms like port drivers and NIFs to interact with the outside world, they don't seem to have been very popular for doing systems programming or using low-level POSIX interfaces, even if there is some work on that front. It'd be interesting to exploit Erlang's unique properties in building lower level OS infrastructure. I should probably play around with some of the bindings that have been written one day. Also worth checking out is the Nerves Project, a buildroot-based embedded Erlang distribution: http://nerves-project.org/ http://nerves-project.org/

andyl 11y ago

I loved the vision of Erlang on Parallella, but after a bunch of tries did not have any success. Would still love to see it work, but in the meantime have had good experience with Erlang/Elixir on RaspberryPi2. RPi2 has a Quad-core CPU and costs $35 - easy to put together a cluster. Runs standard Erlang - simple to experiment with concurrent programming. Built a web-service that delivers 100's of pages per second on a single device - low memory usage - just great.

tchvil 11y ago
Did you use Phoenix on the Pi?
- andyl 11y ago
  yes

Quequau 11y ago

This is really nice to see... but I have admit I'm really disappointed with how the Parallella has turned out. The 64 core version of the board never shipped in quantity and has apparently been abandoned. There still isn't a practical way to connect them beyond the networking provided by the ARM processor. Lastly, there isn't a lower cost revision of the board intended to use in clusters, which is a shame because it's that ARM/FPGA chip that represents the bulk of the cost & heat of the Parallella board. I love the idea and for the most part the community seemed like reasonable folks... it's just that the Adapteva folks were never really able to deliver on the promises made in the original kickstarter and so the whole ecosystem pretty much stagnated. This morning I read an article about a new many core project using the 64 bit ARMv8 which is supposedly going to be a topic for a talk at this year's Hot Chips... http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/phytium-to-detail-64-core-armv8-a-processor-for-hpc-in-august/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/phytium-t...

vidarh 11y ago
I don't feel they failed to deliver on the promises in the Kickstarter campaign, and while it's disappointing to not yet see more on the 64-core version that was a long shot. However, they got a decent capital infusion last year so hopefully we'll get to see something more come out of that. It's not that surprising that the community is moving slowly: They've shipped something not that far above 10,000 boards, many of which are likely in the hands of Kickstarters backers that bought them because we liked the idea more than because we have time to do all that much with them. They need another iteration and another magnitude increase in community size, really.
- malandrew 11y ago
  People getting developer kits and doing nothing with them I reckon is a common enough problem that could be addressed simply by setting up a market place for people who got a device to sell to someone who might do something with it. For example, I bought an Oculus DK2. I've pretty much not done anything with it because I didn't realize at the time how much computing power I needed to really have fun with the DK2. When I received it and tried it out with my MacBook Pro, I was like "this is really cool and I'd love to play with this more, but I'm not shelling out at least a couple of hundred if not almost a thousand dollars for a desktop with a reasonably powerful GPU that would make the Oculus fun to play with. LeapMotion was another device where I knew several people that had pre-ordered one and ended up doing nothing with it. One of my colleagues has had a Myo sitting on her desk practically unused. Companies making hardware for developers need to find a way to figure out who is actively working with their devices and contact those that are not to let them know that there is a way to sell their unused devices to someone else who might want to develop for it.