
Erlang-OTP and the Parallella Board - shepardrtc
https://www.parallella.org/2015/03/20/erlang-otp-and-the-parallella-board/
======
Quequau
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-t...](http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-
shilov/phytium-to-detail-64-core-armv8-a-processor-for-hpc-in-august/)

~~~
vidarh
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
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.

------
vezzy-fnord
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/)

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

~~~
ZoF
Could you state this in a different way?

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask.

~~~
unoti
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
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.

------
andyl
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
Did you use Phoenix on the Pi?

~~~
andyl
yes

