Hi all,
If you haven't seen it, the Adapteva Epiphany low-power multi-core processor is going open source, funded by a kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-...
The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts.
We've been heavily involved with the Epiphany project since 2008. The team at Embecosm built the GNU tool chain and more recently we've funded research at Bristol University looking at the impact of the compiler on energy consumption.
I'll be talking about Epiphany at the next OSHUG meeting. It is revolutionary, not only in its design and performance, but in the founder's commitment to open source and the way it has been funded right from the beginning. We'll have one there for you to look at!
My colleague James Pallister, will be talking about how compilers can influence the power consumed by a processor, and sharing the results of his open research project at Bristol. He'll have the results for the ARM M0, M3 and A8, XMOS and Eiphany processors.
Look forward to hearing people's ideas of what might be possible with a $99 board with this sort of horsepower!
Best wishes,
Jeremy
The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts.
Not quite. The 50 GFlops/Watt figure is for the Epiphany-IV chip, this project says it will use the older Epiphany-III.
It looks like the Parallella will use a 16 core device delivering 32 GFlops, or 6.4 GFlops/Watt - still rather impressive though!
Nigle
On Fri, 2012-09-28 at 17:44 +0100, Nigel Worsley wrote:
The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts.
Not quite. The 50 GFlops/Watt figure is for the Epiphany-IV chip, this project says it will use the older Epiphany-III.
It looks like the Parallella will use a 16 core device delivering 32 GFlops, or 6.4 GFlops/Watt - still rather impressive though!
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for spotting that - I got carried away.
I see there could be boards next spring with the 64-core Epiphany-IV chip on if they meet stretch funding goals.
But as you note, the 16-core chip for $99 is still pretty impressive. It'll be one of these I'll bring along to OSHUG.
Best wishes,
Jeremy
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Jeremy Bennett jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com wrote:
Hi all,
If you haven't seen it, the Adapteva Epiphany low-power multi-core processor is going open source, funded by a kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-...
The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts.
We've been heavily involved with the Epiphany project since 2008. The team at Embecosm built the GNU tool chain and more recently we've funded research at Bristol University looking at the impact of the compiler on energy consumption.
I'll be talking about Epiphany at the next OSHUG meeting. It is revolutionary, not only in its design and performance, but in the founder's commitment to open source and the way it has been funded right from the beginning. We'll have one there for you to look at!
Hi Jeremy,
Great to hear! Is there a date for the next OSHUG yet? I'd be very interested to come along to this and check it out.
Can you mention the sort of application these boards would lend themselves to? What have Adapteva been using these chips for?
My colleague James Pallister, will be talking about how compilers can influence the power consumed by a processor, and sharing the results of his open research project at Bristol. He'll have the results for the ARM M0, M3 and A8, XMOS and Eiphany processors.
Look forward to hearing people's ideas of what might be possible with a $99 board with this sort of horsepower!
Best wishes,
Jeremy
Thanks,
Julius
Hi Julius,
On 28 September 2012 17:53, Julius Baxter juliusbaxter@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Jeremy Bennett jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com wrote:
Hi all,
If you haven't seen it, the Adapteva Epiphany low-power multi-core processor is going open source, funded by a kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-...
The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts.
We've been heavily involved with the Epiphany project since 2008. The team at Embecosm built the GNU tool chain and more recently we've funded research at Bristol University looking at the impact of the compiler on energy consumption.
I'll be talking about Epiphany at the next OSHUG meeting. It is revolutionary, not only in its design and performance, but in the founder's commitment to open source and the way it has been funded right from the beginning. We'll have one there for you to look at!
Hi Jeremy,
Great to hear! Is there a date for the next OSHUG yet? I'd be very interested to come along to this and check it out.
It will be Thursday 15th November. I'll update the website with details once details of the other two talks are in.
Can you mention the sort of application these boards would lend themselves to? What have Adapteva been using these chips for?
Software-defined radio would seem like an obvious one. I've tried using a Raspberry Pi for this but it just doesn't have the floating point performance for even moderate bandwidth digital communications modes. E.g. aviation Mode S transponder decoding [1] was a non-starter. And while the flexibility afforded by SDR is a huge benefit, the need for powerful and power hungry general purpose processors is a drawback.
I had hoped that the XMOS chips would gain support for use in SDR applications, but I'm guessing it would require a lot of engineering work. Whereas ISTR that there has been some work on using GNU Radio applications with GPU hardware via OpenCL, so GNU Radio support on Epiphany would seem more promising...
Best,
Andrew
[1] http://www.designspark.com/content/watching-planes-software-defined-radio
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Andrew Back -
Jeremy Bennett -
Julius Baxter -
Nigel Worsley