
New Parallella Boards - ungerik
http://www.parallella.org/2014/07/14/new-parallella-product-offerings/
======
wtracy
Well, this post has perfect timing for my ends. :-)
[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sys/4567451353.html](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sys/4567451353.html)

I backed the original Kickstarter, have a bunch of Parallellas, and due to a
cash crunch have to liquidate a bunch of them. Above is the link to my
Craigslist ad.

These have equivalent specs to what Adapteva is calling the "embedded"
version, but they come with the older, smaller heat sink and thus will still
need an external fan.

Note that I'm both selling below Adapteva's list price and that the version
I'm selling is marked "out of stock" on Adapteva's site. :-)

~~~
saganus
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
Right 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
Sorry, 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
Okay, 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.

------
aylons
The fact that price goes down as the application goes from server to desktop
to embedded is very telling, in several ways.

One way is the commoditization of computing: actual computer power is now a
commodity, with very low prices and standardized interfaces. Ethernet is the
new pallet, and servers are trucks.

On the other extreme, the embedded landscape demands catering for each
application, demanding a lot of GPIOs, specific hardware and hand work. It
gets expensive.

Of course, the Parallella just shows this in such a nice way because it evens
the (massive) computing power in all offerings, that differ only in interface.
Actual consumer products will try to balance this, but it still tells us a
history.

~~~
dragontamer

         The fact that price goes down as the application goes 
         from server to desktop to embedded is very telling, in 
         several ways.
    

The fact that you've fallen for a very simple marketing trick? The name
"server", "desktop", and "embedded" are marketing terms. They're all the same
CPU. The main difference is the number of GPIO pins between the board numbers.

Basic marketing trick. Always name your products as "good, better, and best"
in some form. Unfortunately, it feels slimy to me, and I don't like it.

That said, I do like the idea of the Epiphany chip they're offering. But based
on cost and performance alone, its clear that a $120 AMD R7 260x graphics card
will be superior to what they offer here. (With its 14 compute units at 1.1
GHz, can do 896 SIMD integer or single-precision floating point operations per
clock). R7 260x also has Windows / Linux drivers and OpenCL support
included...

Epiphany is doing a disservice to themselves if they are trying to compete
against "desktop" and "server" computers. Their niche is in their performance
/ watt. GPUs, with their 5GHz+ GDDR5 RAM, ~GHz clock speed, and super-parallel
architectures will continue to dominate supercomputing at the ~100W to ~500W
levels.

Epiphany IV is a supercomputer design at ~2W. Anything more is settled by the
current laptop market. (AMD Kabini hits 150 GFLOPs at ~25W for only ~$60 CPU
on a $30 motherboard)

~~~
marcosdumay
IO also costs money, often more than the actual circuitry.

They certainly have some margin, and it's probably bigger at the embbebed
version, but it's not only a marketing trick.

~~~
dragontamer
I agree... its not "only" a marketing trick. The Epiphany IV looks like a
unique computer architecture that I'd be excited to play around with (if I
ever got the time...).

But I think its a bit of a stretch to call their "Desktop" offering suitable
for "A Personal Computer", especially when the Zynq Z7020 is the core CPU of
it. The performance offered is solidly in the "embedded" realm, and barely
will be more powerful than your cell phone. (1GB of RAM is weaker than most
people's cell phones...)

------
m_mueller
I wonder how long it's going to take until someone is going to port OpenCL
natively to Fortran. Lots of Fortran programmers in HPC and they currently can
only use NVIDIA GPUs and Intel MIC. ARM platforms could be interesting in the
long run. I hope either AMD or Cray take the plunge. If that happens, I'd be
happy to integrate Parallela with my parallel computing preprocessor
framework[1].

[1] [https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-
Fortran](https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran)

------
agumonkey
Parallella went through a lot of production issues. Happy to see them having
momentum now they fulfilled their KS deliveries.

------
ChuckMcM
So glad these folks haven't died. If I can get one it will be a nice
complement to the Zedboard.

Still need to get the bugs worked out of my Xilinx on Ubuntu setup though.
Annoys me to have to run Windows in a VM to use the toolchain.

~~~
mng2
For what it's worth, I haven't had any trouble on RHEL (which is recommended).

------
rektide
Is a 64-core model in sight at all?

~~~
Quequau
In sight? Yes. Shipping to more than the original Kickstarter Backers?
Probably not.

