Parallela - A Credit-Card Sized Computer with over 64 Cores

[WaeV 5,049]

Stumbled upon this while browsing the internet, and thought you folk might find it interesting.

 

The Parallela looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi

 

 

But its architecture is way different! There's a dual-core ARM processor to run Linux, but there's an additional "Epiphany" co-processor, with 64 cores! The ARM cores and Epiphany cores are connected by FPGAs, which are reprogrammable hardware.

 

 

The epiphany co-processor is a lot like a graphics card in that it's not where the OS is running -- it's only there to provide additional, specialized processing power.

However, the epiphany cores are much more like desktop processors than GPUs are, making them easier to program.

 

Writing code to take advantage of the 64 epiphany cores would be interesting enough, but Parallela is also intended to be used for making clusters. At $99 each, it's relatively easy to buy more than one.

 

 

Even at $99 each, compute power can be pretty pricey. To get real supercomputer levels you would need to spend an arm and a leg. At least there's an affordable "starter edition" of sorts.

And Parallela does win pretty big on power consumption. Each board only consumes 5 watts.

 

Here's a bigger cluster:

 

 

Unfortunately the 64-core version isn't for sale yet; only the older 16-core one is. Hopefully it's up soon!

 

http://www.adapteva.com/parallella/

[Takka 13,377]

That push-pull setup is sexy.

[Skeezix the Cat 3,089]

I can hear AMD fapping from here.

[Solaris 3,581]

I posted this a while back on that Raspberry Pi 2 thread. It's pretty neat and I really hope it goes somewhere. It'd be really nice if they got it to a point where it's just plug and play with little configuration required on the end user's part with the ability to keep adding onto it (within limits)

[WaeV 5,049]

Plug-and-play would be really difficult. I really can't see this being used outside of scientific / hobbyist applications, unfortunately.

The Epiphany architecture is so different it practically demands a ground-up rewrite of whatever software you want to run on it.

[Solaris 3,581]

One can dream.

[Btcc22 691]

Heard about this quite a long time ago. Disappointing to see that they haven't really delivered, with the 64 core version being unavailable.

 

I figured that it could be a cheap way for programmers to get to grips with parallel programming and testing their software's scaling characteristics (probably not though, architecture issues there) but with only 16 cores, I'm not so sure. I can find a desktop PC with that many logical processors (or close enough) or I could just use a GPU if I need some real grunt. I'm struggling to see a use for this.

Edited March 10, 2015 by Btcc22

[WaeV 5,049]

It's absolutely not useful so long as there are only 16 cores, and 64 isn't a sweet enough deal for me to buy in. Allegedly this architecture scales really well, though -- 256 cores might be interesting.

 

I'd also like to see some independently-verified benchmarks. I'm sure transferring data into the epiphany grid to be processed isn't a cheap operation.