
My Name is Brian and I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time (2014) - peter_d_sherman
https://www.parallella.org/2014/06/03/my-name-is-brian-and-i-build-supercomputers-in-my-spare-time/
======
eismcc
This is Brian. I switched over to Nvidia hardware after building this because
of Moore’s law and access to libraries / tools.
[http://www.parallac.org](http://www.parallac.org) has some of my machines.

~~~
supercomputery
> because of Moore’s law

can you care to elaborate? how is switching to nvidia justified by "becasue of
Moore's law"? Genuinely curious.

~~~
eismcc
By the time the parallella Kickstarter shipped, Nvidia shipped the TK1, which
was roughly 10x faster FLOPS-wise than a single parallella board. Cost was
similar.

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supercomputery
kind of tired of calling every small cluster a supercomputer. as someone who
has been building actual supercomputers (think top 5-10) for over 25 years, it
is very frustrating to hear such misinformation.

encourage parallel computing and scale out - dont call every small project a
supercomputer.

~~~
eismcc
Generally agree. The spirit of the term “supercomputer” in my case is tied to
a) massive respect for Seymour Cray b) achieving something in the realm of
late 90s scale according to top500 and d) parallella’s marketing.

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bayesian_horse
What happened to the 64 core version? And do these chips actually serve a
purpose beyond just experimentation and maybe embedded computing?

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slededit
They failed and the guy behind it joined DARPA. You may have seen their new
electronics initiative posted here a few weeks ago - that's run by him.

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gnufx
No, it isn't a supercomputer. These things (whether they be Parallela, Pi, or
whatever) are generally at least an order of magnitude too low in every
parameter relevant compared with a single node of a real HPC system.

A typical University system from that time might have been have been >~100
nodes with 16 Sandy Bridge cores, ~20 DGEMM GFLOPs and >=2GB ECC memory per
core, a QDR Infiniband interconnect (~1μs latency, 40GB bandwidth), and >100TB
of Lustre parallel filesystem. Also you could actually manage the hardware.

~~~
felixgallo
Don’t be like that. The shorthand here is that this is a novel, massively
parallel architecture, much like those in supercomputers. If it had been
adopted and scaled up, it could have had interesting applications.

~~~
gnufx
"Like that" as in trying to educate? Too bad.

This described something isn't "massively parallel" and couldn't scale up. I'm
happy with calling the big Sunway- and PEZY-based systems supercomputers and
hope that Neo turns out well.

~~~
ianai
You’re violating the rules of HN.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
More precisely:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something."

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
ianai
I saw OP threw in technical points where the hobby machine is not like a
production HPC box - after issuing a dismissal of the work entirely. HN does
best when it gives a hobbyist a good faith appraisal of his/her work. A
hobbyist is of course not going to have the resources to do HPC at home -
usually.

~~~
mmt
> I saw OP threw in technical points where the hobby machine is not like a
> production HPC box - after issuing a dismissal of the work entirely.

Which would make it a non-shallow dismissal, as it provided a number of
specific discussion points, which are, in fact, being discussed. The
guidelines don't, after all, discourage dismissal (even dismissal in
entirety), only _shallow_ dismissal.

> HN does best when it gives a hobbyist a good faith appraisal of his/her
> work.

This strikes me as a very subject assertion, all around. It's a matter of
opinion on how HN does best, and it's a matter of opinion what constitutes a
good faith appraisal, especially as it relates to a hobby.

That said, I might agree for a "Show HN" post, but not for a repost of
something 4 years old, with the arguably clickbaity (and patently, unarguably
controversial) unqualified term "supercomputers" in the title.

> A hobbyist is of course not going to have the resources to do HPC at home -
> usually.

If not, I'm left to wonder, what's the point? Where is the performance "high"
or the computing "super"?

I could somewhat wrap my brain around a hobbyist building a very small (in
node count) HPC cluster as a testbed. I could also understand if the goal were
something like cost-performance efficiency improvement (for purchase and/or
operating cost). Is that what's going on here? I didn't get that from the
article, and only one comment claimed the architecture is "novel" without
specifying in what way.

I didn't even see anything to suggest scalability/modularity that's easier
than "real" HPC, but that could be because I missed it among the emphasis on
handmade construction.

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ObsoleteNerd
I only see a blank page for this blog, due to NoScript, but what's weird, is I
can't disabled NoScript for this domain at all, and it says "This is a
privileged page, whose permissions cannot be configured."

I've never been to this site before, and never seen any other domain do this
to NoScript.

