

Parallella: Raspberry Pi-like open parallel computing hardware - JonasH
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone

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malandrew
Sounds awesome, but I have a few comments I'm going to braindump:

$750k seems really ambitious for a kickstarter project with such a niche
audience. Is that realistic for 29 days, considering you need to sell 7500
units of the $99 pledge amount? At the end of day 7, Leapmotion had 15,000
applications for a free leap motion device and SDK, and that is a device with
a much larger audience.

Do you have any investor lined up that would be willing to maybe match a
Kickstarter total pledge amount of something realistic like $375k?

Have you considered approaching a fund like In-Q-Tel? This seems like the kind
of project they would fund, since I imagine a lot of the best parallel
computing work is being done in government-funded agencies and labs. I also
imagine the government is probably the biggest employer of people working on
parallel processing devices. With that in mind, getting a device like this
into the hands of many, allows more people to get hands on exposure to
parallel computing.

Overall, it feels like the funding strategy needs to be diversified, because I
imagine it will be difficult to get $750k all from one source, with the
exception of a VC fund whose thesis aligns with your goals.

Lastly, it feels like a project like this would be a bit too soon. Many
developers who are playing with hardware have been playing around with the
arduino for a few years, some are now graduating to the Raspberry Pi, which
offers clear benefits over the Arduino because you can run tons of stuff
simply not possible on the Arduino. However as the Raspberry Pi just came out,
I imagine that most developers are still trying to get their hands on
something like it and still don't feel the pain of trying to solve problems
with it, that could only be solved with something like the parallella.

As a hobbyist, besides exploring parallel computing for its own sake, what
other kinds of problems can I explore/solve with the parallella which simply
wouldn't be possible on the raspberry pi? Sell a dream and possibilities here.
I'm personally not familiar with what would only be possible on a parallella
and I might feel more interested in this project if I know why I'd want it
(besides learning pp for its own sake).

~~~
SoapSeller
According to Ars-Technica[0] they already raised $2.5 million from VCs.

[0] [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/09/99-ras...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/09/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-touted-in-kickstarter-
project/)

~~~
krichman
I've been seeing more Kickstarters after funding lately. I guess it's a good
way to test demand and get the word out. But it feels like it's against the
spirit of the thing.

------
gbraad
It is a nice try. Looks quite similar to the Creative Zii (Egg platform) and
the Zii Labs' ZMS-05 processor which they marketed as "Stemcell Computing"...
and a lot of other attempts.

They use a Zenboard (Xilinx Zync, ARM+FPGA) as a base platform. My first
reaction; they claim this being 'open source'. Nothing about the ARM processor
or even the core inside the FPGA is open source. What they will deliver is the
toolchain and the documentation, but no IP or RTL code for the cores. Another
Fauxpen source project... using it merely as a buzzword to get people
involved; comparable to the Beagleboard to get usecases and branding out.

When hardware is called "open source", they need to look at how Milkymist does
it. PCB design files are offered, but also the RTL verilog is available for
the CPU (in fact the whole SoC).

~~~
jws
They are specific about their open source intentions.

 _Open Source: The Parallella platform will be based on free open source
development tools and libraries. All board design files will be provided as
open source once the Parallella boards are released._

So we won't be able to fabricate our own derivative silicon. But we will have
all open source drivers and tools. We won't have chips full of DSPs that we
can't use, or GPUs that work a little bit through some driver that the silicon
vendor had to get to MVP for a single version of Linux and can abandon in a
year. Sounds good to me.

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AceJohnny2
What's wrong with the Parallax Propeller? You can get a starter kit for $25
[1]. Granted, you used to have to program it in its own language, but C
compilers are popping up [2]

[1] <http://adafruit.com/products/791> [2]
<http://propeller.wikispaces.com/Programming+in+C+-+Catalina>

~~~
wtracy
The Propeller doesn't have sixteen cores running at 2+ GHz with a gig of ram.
The Propeller can't even run a real, modern OS.

~~~
ErrantX
_The Propeller can't even run a real, modern OS_

Well... technically neither can this :)

Although they do appear to have got it working really neatly with an ARM-based
host board. Which is a step forward.

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backprojection
This sounds great, but why is it a kick starter project? If the claims they're
making are reasonable, it seems to me that, for instance, Google would be more
than a little interested, and could easily cough up $750K. What am I missing?

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is a really good question.

Not necessarily Google, they are famous for not investing in other people to
do engineering, but it seems like a modest amount of money to get something
that should be fairly widely applicable.

Of course if it is widely applicable and this investment gets to company what
it needs to take off, well the folks who gave them the money aren't really
going to benefit in a leveraged way. (No equity)

Perhaps they were hoping for a 'raspberry pi' like response (which would be
hundreds of thousands of units) and be able to do a sort of stealth funding
round kinda thing. No idea of course, but it would be a sweet result if it
worked out for them right?

------
ricardobeat
The "Making parallel computing easy" and "The goal of the Parallella project
is to democratize access to parallel computing" lines made me immediately
think of the Parallax Propeller.

Turns out their product isn't remotely similar: up to 64 cores at 800mhz, plus
a dual-core ARM CPU. I wonder why they are doing a kickstarter instead of
harvesting their dollars from server appliances.

~~~
blacksmythe
Because they are not ready to harvest dollars from server appliances, and
would like someone to fund their engineering.

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iyulaev
Hasn't the whole massive multicore thing been floating around the server space
for a few years now? I remember HP Project Moonshot and Sea Micro and a few
other projects to built multi-chip ARM servers. However, I don't recall seeing
ANY benchmarks that demonstrated that they were any more efficient, per watt,
in a REAL application, than the x86 competition. I would _really_ like to see
such a data point. I guess now it's being sold as a novelty to let people play
with such a technology, which is fine I guess.

The CISC vs. RISC days are long over and the battle between the two
architectures is a bit silly at this point since the gap between the
instruction set and the underlying implementation has gotten quite dramatic.
Claims that RISC chips are inherently more efficient may have been true in
1995, but I don't see this holding water today.

~~~
wmf
For Linpack it has been demonstrated that GPUs and MIC are more energy-
efficient than server x86, although Blue Gene beats them all.
[http://www.green500.org/lists/green201206&green500from=1...](http://www.green500.org/lists/green201206&green500from=1&green500to=100)

~~~
iyulaev
I'm certainly not going to argue against GPUs (or FPGAs) being used in
scientific applications where performance is limited by floating point or
vector performance. In certain scientific applications they can hand general-
purpose CPUs their butts. I'm talking about ARM/RISC vs x86 CPUs for server
applications.

~~~
wmf
Sorry, I went on a tangent there. The benefits of wimpy cores have certainly
been elusive. Some good links
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/fr//pubs/archive/36448.pdf)
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/trishulc/paper...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/trishulc/papers/low_power_cores.pdf)
[http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...](http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy.pdf)

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aristidb
I'm hardly an expert in this, but doesn't that architecture look similar to
Intel's MIC architecture (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MIC>) with the
upcoming Xeon Phi product? See also [http://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/28/intel-
details-knights-cor...](http://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/28/intel-details-
knights-corner-architecture-at-long-last/)

~~~
yvdriess
It's more similar to the Tilera64 chips and ye olde Transputer. Key difference
is the reliance of the MIC on cache coherency across all cores.

------
wtracy
Has anyone here worked with Epiphany chips before? Are there any special APIs
required to use them effectively? How hard would it be to get Haskell code
running on one?

~~~
JonasH
There is a C/C++ SDK available.

~~~
wtracy
Is the SDK publicly available right now?

~~~
cookiemonster44
[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120822005093/en/Adap...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120822005093/en/Adapteva-
Announces-Availability-OpenCL-SDK-Epiphany-Multicore)

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cottonseed
What's with the 800GHz operating frequency nonsense? In the 64 core chip, each
core runs at 1GHz. I thought a $199 64 core option would have been more
interesting.

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xradionut
It's an interesting project, the Epiphany chips. For my interests, the
alternatives are FPGAs and GPUs. I'm thinking their sweet spot might be in
portable, lower power devices that need performance. I have a few applications
(mainly DSP and SDR) that require a certain amount of MIPs that is hard to
achive in a microcontroller, but is possible in a robust laptop. (But who
wants to drag a portable workstation in the field?)

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Destroyer661
_The Parallella project will make parallel computing accessible to everyone._

I think their marketing is a bit off on this one. Does _everyone_ actually
need parallel computing on this scale? I don't think so. Those who do need it
likely already have CUDA running on GPGPUs. Not that I'm implying stifle
innovation but the crowd they're marketing to seems to be way off base.

~~~
hn_is_vile
Yes, everyone needs parallel computing on this scale, it's just that they
don't know it (yet). In the same way that everyone needed 3Ghz single core CPU
when they already had 2GHz single core CPUs.

GPUs are different to CPUs in many ways, not least of which is that they are
very difficult to debug, do not support recursion (this might have changed?),
need special,non-standard data structures (streams). Multi-core CPUs suffer
none of these limitations and developers can use non-proprietary standard
build tools to develop software for them.

------
mbq
Sorry, but you can't do any serious computation with 1GB of RAM; do it 149$
but with 4GB minimum.

~~~
cdwhite
Not true. I spent a summer not too long ago doing quantum Monte Carlo
calculations for condensed-matter physics, and IIRC Valgrind showed that the
whole thing was under 5 MB. Not only did it not require 1GB of RAM, but code +
data fit in the L2 cache of each node. (We were seriously CPU bound, not
memory bound.) I can't speak to how much of a market there is for something
with 1GB RAM, but you certainly can do "serious computation" with far less
than that.

~~~
mbq
Well yeah, this is an exaggeration; things like brute force hash reversing can
take kilobytes. Yet you must admit that such problems are in minority even in
material science. Also note that some Linux distros in GUI mode can take like
half of that alone (this is this household-experimentation-with-parallelism
use-case they advocate in the proposal).

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colomon
Was all ready to kick in $99 on the off chance I might get an interesting
little machine out of it, but when I clicked on their "Epiphany Multicore
Accelerator (16 or 64 cores)" link, it came up with a 404 not found page
error. That's not exactly reassuring.

~~~
cottonseed
Seems to be a typo. Looks like this is the correct link:
<http://www.adapteva.com/products/silicon-devices/>.

