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Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying

102 points by ahalan 14y ago

aristidb 14y ago
Dying? At $612K of $750K raised with 31 hours to go? Is there something I don't understand there? EDIT: Realizing that mods might change the title at any time, it is right now "Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying"
- schiffern 14y ago
  With 31 hours to go. If they don't raise $138,000 in 31 hours they get squat.
- Eduardo3rd 14y ago
  They only have 31 hours left to raise the rest of the money. Considering they fact that they took several weeks to reach this point it seems unlikely that they will hit the goal, and therefore they will not secure any of the pledged funds.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    It slowed down for a long time, but it's sped up again the last few days, and in less than the last 20 minutes they've gotten another $6k. It's going to be close either way it seems.
- vidarh 14y ago
  Nearly $618k as of 16 minutes after your post... EDIT: $624,602 44 minutes after your post.... I'm getting more optimistic.
- mtgx 14y ago
  The title suggests they get nothing if they don't raise the $750,000 target, which is true.
- Gring 14y ago
  According to kicktraq, they're indeed trending towards not making it (trending to 651k, 86% of goal): http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/ http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-super...
Eduardo3rd 14y ago
I'm impressed that they made it as far as they have. $612k puts them in the top tier of all Kickstarter projects, but unfortunately they look to have set their goal too high. Maybe they can pull a Clang and raise a ton of money in the last 24 hours, but I'd be surprised to see that happen. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
- damian2000 14y ago
  I think they'll make it easily, sort of like what happened to Dalton Caldwell's App.net ... they got a ton of support in the last 12-24 hours.
  - pi18n 14y ago
    Maybe this is cynical, but there seems to be little reason for them to not borrow enough from friends and family to collect from Kickstarter, and pay them back immediately after. Unless the gifts are ridiculously expensive?
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  I think they will succeed. They're selling something that's really cool and a lot of people want to see succeed, but for which there aren't any software applications to take advantage of yet. That's the type of project where a lot of people could donate at the end so that it succeeds. Opposed to say, a game, where there's a ton at the beginning and than it slowly trails off.
kiba 14y ago
For some reason, I thought it relates to the concept of copying the brain of the dead to the computer so that they can live on as disembodied souls in the computer. It just turns out to be a kickstarter project for a powerful computer.
- vidarh 14y ago
  It's not so much that it's a powerful computer, but a computer architecture that can scale up to be a very powerful system. The version they're trying to fund is a cost reduced version including their 16 core chip. They also have a 64 core chip, and plan to scale it much higher. It's differentiated from GPU's in that each core is a simple but fully independent CPU core, with direct access to main system memory AND to the memory of the other cores. This current project is most interesting as a means for people to start playing with the architecture rather than for the raw performance.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    How is it different from Tilera and Intel's Xeon Phi?
    - vidarh 14y ago
      Vs Xeon Phi: Cost, complexity, power. Look at pictures of the Xeon Phi cards. They're covered in heat sink, and with a fan. For comparison, the Epiphany chips are a single tiny die with no cooling. But of course the per-core performance is not likely to be anywhere near Xeon Phi either. I'd consider Epiphany the simple, "slow" (per core), low power solution, with Tilera somewhere in the middle, and Xeon Phi at the other extreme (complex, fast per core, high power usage). That said, this is speculation based on reading articles - I've not had my hand on any of the three. Yet :)
    - lonetech 14y ago
      I've not had the time to read up on Xeon Phi, but compared to the Tilera, the Epiphany is a considerably simpler processor. There's no MMU in the cores, instead of caches there is direct DMA control, and the on-chip network extends past the edges of the chip (that's all the I/O, there are no peripherals in the chip). It all adds up to something you can scale by mounting more of them on a board, assuming your task is sufficiently adaptable to a data flow (since the external bandwidth scales slower than the number of cores). It's not at a level where you can run a general purpose operating system with virtual memory and memory protection (though extending it for that would be fairly easy - perhaps Epiphany V?), nor does it (currently) run multiple threads per core, but this simplicity affords it a much lower power expense. A GPU may be more similar, as those tend to have prefetch operations and no memory protection, but they are designed to have huge bunches of threads doing the exact same type of work. They look like vector processors handling between 16 and 128 identical operations per control core (each a multiprocessor). Mainly the Epiphany is easier to program, but optimization is a different story (similar to place and route processes FPGAs need). It's a move toward a data and control flow granularity currently not available at a price for individuals. And to make it more useful, those individuals need to try things.
vidarh 14y ago
I'm happy to see it get more attention, but to say it is "dying" is a bit hyperbolic. Sure, the Kickstarter campaign seems like it's unlikely to meet its target. But from the sounds of it I don't think the company behind it will just give up if that happens. I know for my part if they put up another campaign, preferably with a longer lead time, elsewhere and/or take pre-orders, I'll commit again and I'm sure a lot of the other people who signed up will too. I think it was unfortunate that they didn't release all the material they've released in the last few days right at the beginning of the campaign, though - they'd likely have done better. They've also clearly had a hard time explaining to people what it's for, which is a pity. I don't think the 16 core version by itself is all that interesting from a performance point of view, but I'm interested in the architecture in the hope that they manage to pull of the 64 core version and larger. EDIT: It's added $20k in the hour since I wrote this - happily it looks like it's got a good chance to succeed.
bhickey 14y ago
Hasn't Amazon already done this with EC2? (Edit: Written in response to the title.)
- vidarh 14y ago
  Huh? How does this have anything to do with EC2? Parallella is an dual core ARM board with an FPGA and a 16 core Epiphany CPU (full general purpose CPU cores with 32k static RAM built into each core - all the cores can access the memory of all other cores as well as system RAM). 1GB RAM total. Expected size around a credit card or so. The main purpose is the Epiphany CPU, which they also have a 64 core version of. Their problem is that their current CPU's are produced using a process that gives them very low yields and very high per-CPU cost. The main goal of the bounty is to enable them to switch to a much higher yield process and bring the per-chip cost of the 16 core version down to a few dollars per chip. Their long term roadmap is boards with 1000+ cores.
- wmf 14y ago
  Yeah, the cloud is much more accessible "for everyone" than this chip. If you want to learn parallel programming rent a GPU instance.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    A GPU has a totally different architecture and programming model. It is interesting for very different types of uses.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Who rents GPUs?
pbharrin 14y ago
I think the market is telling these guys: We don't care about computing power. People are getting by with iPads and Chromebooks powered by ARM cores with 1/8 the computing power of an Intel processor. Don't get me wrong if you want to play around with parallel computing you should love this, and support it. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't reach Pebble funding levels.
- amalag 14y ago
  They want to enable small scale computers to do more powerful computations, i don't think it is directly for ipad's and chromebooks, it could be useful for something like a quadcopter where there is a algorithm that gives better stability but needs more computational power.
- wmf 14y ago
  They're actually providing much less computing power than even a low-end PC.
polyfractal 14y ago
Could someone explain how this is different from GPU computing and regular multi-core CPU computing? I realize there is a difference...but I'm not quite sure I grasp it yet. GPU computing is a lot of parallel math computations with limited shared memory. I'm assuming the Epiphany CPU is more capable than the simple GPU math units? How's it different from multi-core CPUs? Just the sheer quantity of cores they have packed in there?
- vidarh 14y ago
  It's closer to regular multi-core CPU computing than GPU computing. It's general purpose cores. What sets it apart is that the cores are tiny, with little per-core memory (though all cores can transparently access each-others memory as well as main memory), and so the architecture is well suited for scaling up the number of cores with quite low power consumption. So for problems that can be parallelized reasonably well, but with more complex data dependencies than what a GPU is good for, this might be a good fit. I'd put it somewhere in the middle between GPU's (for embarrassingly parallel tasks) and general purpose CPU's with high throughput per core. Also, this looks like it'd be possible to fit in the power envelope of really small embedded systems, like e.g. cellphones and tablets.... Before more developers have these systems, it'll be hard to say how useful they'll be, but the architecture looks exciting. That's why I supported it - I really want to see how this type of architecture can be exploited, and whether or not it'll prove to be cost effective and/or simpler to work with than GPU's for the right type of problems.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ArchD 14y ago
  Typical multicore CPUs don't have nearly as many cores as Parallella. Also, from what I can from www.apteva.com/introduction, the power consumption is much lower and the interconnect is different. In Parallella, cores are laid out in a grid and cores can only talk directly to their neighbors.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  I've done my master thesis on GPGPU, so maybe I can help out a bit. I'm not yet too familiar with Epiphany's design however. From what I could grasp what sets them apart the most is a different memory architecture compared to multicore CPUs, where the individual cores seem to be optimized for accessing adjacent memory locations as well as the locations of the direct neighbors. This is one point where the architecture seems to be similar to GPUs, although GPUs have a very different memory architecture again - for the programmer it might look similar however, especially when using OpenCL. The main point where Epiphany is diverging from GPUs is that the individual cores are complete RISC environments. This could mainly be a big plus when it comes to branching and subprocedure calls (although NVIDIA is catching up on the later point with Kepler 2). On GPUs the kernel subprocedures currently all need to be inlined and branches mean that the cores that aren't executing the current branch are just sleeping - Epiphany cores seem to be more independent in that regard. I still expect an efficient programming model to be along the same lines as CUDA/OpenCL for epiphany however - which is a good thing btw., this model has been very successful in the high performance community and it's actually quite easy to understand - much easier than cache optimizing for CPU for example. If we compare epiphany to CPU what's mainly missing is the CPU's cache architecture, hyperthreading, long pipelines per core, SSE on each core, possibly out-of-order and intricate branch prediction (not sure on those last ones). The missing caches might be a bit of a problem. The memory bandwidth they specify seems pretty good to me, but from personal experience I'd add another 20-30% to the achievable bandwidth if you have a good cache (which GPU has since Fermi for example). The other simplifications I actually like a lot - to me it makes much more sense to have a massive parallel system where you can just specify everything as scalar instead of doing all the SSE and hyperthreading hoops like on CPUs - optimizing for CPU is quite a pain compared to those new models.
eigenrick 14y ago
It's a shame they're not making something useless like a video game. Then they'd have millions.
- lonetech 14y ago
  Video games is exactly where heterogenous computers like this have flourished. But they don't have a game to market it yet - historically it hasn't even mattered much if that initial game used the platform anywhere near well. How did the Ouya sell, for instance? (It really resembles a Nexus 7 with a broken screen.)
mendocino 14y ago
> we see a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform > FAQ: Will you open source the Epiphany chips? > Not initially, but it may be considered in the future. Well, that makes it a lot less interesting than I hoped it would be.
- vidarh 14y ago
  You were hoping for what exactly? VHDL/Verilog for the chips? Netlists? For most people I'd assume the main thing is that the architecture is well documented and open, as well as the board, and they have released all of the architecture documentation and a lot of other material. As much as it'd be great to have a market in other sources for the chips, unless/until the architecture has some traction that is pretty irrelevant.
rrreese 14y ago
Several commenters and the OP, seem to think that this Kickstarter will fail. Having backed quite few Kickstarter campaigns, and watched a lot more, this seems unlikely. Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed. It seems that many people delay backing till the last minute. Possibly this is just human nature, though the Kickstarter process also means that as the project progresses more information is released in a steady stream, and often new funding levels are created. Additionally backers who really want the project to succeed raise their pledges to help the project succeed.
- mikepurvis 14y ago
  And no big project like this would ever fail by < $50,000. Wouldn't the founders or their investors or whatever just max their credit cards to see it through? Does Kickstarter explicitly prohibit such things?
jws 14y ago
At some point in the next 24 hours, the backers who signed up for one unit will need to ask themselves if they would rather have two units or zero. I can't speak for the other 1800 people in my bin, but I just decided on two.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Isn't that (multiples as pledge awards) a direct violation of the letter and spirit of kickstarters new rules?
almost 14y ago
Only $99 for the first reward that actually will come with a board to play with. Sounds good to me! I've added $119 (international shipping!) to the total, hope they make it...
dkhenry 14y ago
While I am happy to see another post for this on the front page, I would have preferred a positive post. People jump on bandwagons I would rather we started a positive bandwagon rather then one looking to find the shovels and a decent grave for a awesome project
- kemiller 14y ago
  For what it's worth, this is the first I've heard of it, and this convinced me to contribute.
nilsimsa 14y ago
If the current trend rate continues, they should be able to reach their goal. If they could somehow get on the Reddit front page it would easily happen. I think there are many who might be interested if they only knew. Here is the trend graph: http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...
dannnnnnny 14y ago
Argh! I get paid in a couple of days! I was hoping the cash would go into my account before this runs out. Looks like that might not happen now.... Why couldn't you have given us another few days? Oh well. I bet it'll get funded.
incision 14y ago
I seem to recall repeatedly reading that Kickstarter projects collect he majority of their funding in the first 72 and final 24 hours. My anecdotal experience backing and following half a dozen projects agrees with this. I'd be quite surprised if this project doesn't make it.
joshuafcole 14y ago
I did my part. I'm very much the archetypal broke college student at the moment, but I won't always be. I have big plans in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning sectors, and I can't imagine a better, cheaper solution to get started on working with multi-agent systems. I desperately want to see this sort of pricing for cluster computing available in the future, when I have the scratch and knowledge necessary to make these ideas into products. I think that future is worth skipping the occasional movie or meal to pay into, and I'm looking forward to my somewhat unexpected end of year gift.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Here is one cheaper solution: simulate a multi agent system on your laptop. You don't need parallel hardware to ave multiple agents.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
GregBuchholz 14y ago
Has anyone played with the 144-core GreenArray's IC? http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/
- jws 14y ago
  GreenArrays are intriguing, but a completely different animal from this computer. The GreenArrays compute nodes are microscopic by comparison. Think 256 bytes of storage, shared with instructions and data. If you can map your problem on to them they seem very efficient.
converging 14y ago
It's alive. Alive! Adapteva reached their target; right now they are at $769,996 pledged with a $750,000 goal, which was cleared on october 27th between 2 and 3 am. Not sure what (US) timezone this refers to. Source: http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...), 13.700 projects graphed). Great project, Daniel. Did not delve into past performance of kickstarter projects, but comments from across the net seem to confirm rrreese's comment: "Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed." Canhekickit states several todo's, of which aggregates and prediction would be especially useful. Any comments on how the funding dynamic of future kickstarter/other crowdfunding projects would be affected if this data would be available?
laacz 14y ago
I wonder, if this was elaborate reverse engeneering of hn crowd to reach Parallella financing target :)
Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
Well, they made it and more: Funding: $788,138 of $750,000

102 points by ahalan 14y ago

Dying? At $612K of $750K raised with 31 hours to go? Is there something I don't understand there? EDIT: Realizing that mods might change the title at any time, it is right now "Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone is Dying"

schiffern 14y ago
With 31 hours to go. If they don't raise $138,000 in 31 hours they get squat.
Eduardo3rd 14y ago
They only have 31 hours left to raise the rest of the money. Considering they fact that they took several weeks to reach this point it seems unlikely that they will hit the goal, and therefore they will not secure any of the pledged funds.
- vidarh 14y ago
  It slowed down for a long time, but it's sped up again the last few days, and in less than the last 20 minutes they've gotten another $6k. It's going to be close either way it seems.
vidarh 14y ago
Nearly $618k as of 16 minutes after your post... EDIT: $624,602 44 minutes after your post.... I'm getting more optimistic.
mtgx 14y ago
The title suggests they get nothing if they don't raise the $750,000 target, which is true.
Gring 14y ago
According to kicktraq, they're indeed trending towards not making it (trending to 651k, 86% of goal): http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/ http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-super...

Eduardo3rd 14y ago

I'm impressed that they made it as far as they have. $612k puts them in the top tier of all Kickstarter projects, but unfortunately they look to have set their goal too high. Maybe they can pull a Clang and raise a ton of money in the last 24 hours, but I'd be surprised to see that happen. Here's hoping I'm wrong.

damian2000 14y ago
I think they'll make it easily, sort of like what happened to Dalton Caldwell's App.net ... they got a ton of support in the last 12-24 hours.
- pi18n 14y ago
  Maybe this is cynical, but there seems to be little reason for them to not borrow enough from friends and family to collect from Kickstarter, and pay them back immediately after. Unless the gifts are ridiculously expensive?
jivatmanx 14y ago
I think they will succeed. They're selling something that's really cool and a lot of people want to see succeed, but for which there aren't any software applications to take advantage of yet. That's the type of project where a lot of people could donate at the end so that it succeeds. Opposed to say, a game, where there's a ton at the beginning and than it slowly trails off.

kiba 14y ago

For some reason, I thought it relates to the concept of copying the brain of the dead to the computer so that they can live on as disembodied souls in the computer. It just turns out to be a kickstarter project for a powerful computer.

vidarh 14y ago
It's not so much that it's a powerful computer, but a computer architecture that can scale up to be a very powerful system. The version they're trying to fund is a cost reduced version including their 16 core chip. They also have a 64 core chip, and plan to scale it much higher. It's differentiated from GPU's in that each core is a simple but fully independent CPU core, with direct access to main system memory AND to the memory of the other cores. This current project is most interesting as a means for people to start playing with the architecture rather than for the raw performance.
- mtgx 14y ago
  How is it different from Tilera and Intel's Xeon Phi?
  - vidarh 14y ago
    Vs Xeon Phi: Cost, complexity, power. Look at pictures of the Xeon Phi cards. They're covered in heat sink, and with a fan. For comparison, the Epiphany chips are a single tiny die with no cooling. But of course the per-core performance is not likely to be anywhere near Xeon Phi either. I'd consider Epiphany the simple, "slow" (per core), low power solution, with Tilera somewhere in the middle, and Xeon Phi at the other extreme (complex, fast per core, high power usage). That said, this is speculation based on reading articles - I've not had my hand on any of the three. Yet :)
  - lonetech 14y ago
    I've not had the time to read up on Xeon Phi, but compared to the Tilera, the Epiphany is a considerably simpler processor. There's no MMU in the cores, instead of caches there is direct DMA control, and the on-chip network extends past the edges of the chip (that's all the I/O, there are no peripherals in the chip). It all adds up to something you can scale by mounting more of them on a board, assuming your task is sufficiently adaptable to a data flow (since the external bandwidth scales slower than the number of cores). It's not at a level where you can run a general purpose operating system with virtual memory and memory protection (though extending it for that would be fairly easy - perhaps Epiphany V?), nor does it (currently) run multiple threads per core, but this simplicity affords it a much lower power expense. A GPU may be more similar, as those tend to have prefetch operations and no memory protection, but they are designed to have huge bunches of threads doing the exact same type of work. They look like vector processors handling between 16 and 128 identical operations per control core (each a multiprocessor). Mainly the Epiphany is easier to program, but optimization is a different story (similar to place and route processes FPGAs need). It's a move toward a data and control flow granularity currently not available at a price for individuals. And to make it more useful, those individuals need to try things.

vidarh 14y ago

I'm happy to see it get more attention, but to say it is "dying" is a bit hyperbolic. Sure, the Kickstarter campaign seems like it's unlikely to meet its target. But from the sounds of it I don't think the company behind it will just give up if that happens. I know for my part if they put up another campaign, preferably with a longer lead time, elsewhere and/or take pre-orders, I'll commit again and I'm sure a lot of the other people who signed up will too. I think it was unfortunate that they didn't release all the material they've released in the last few days right at the beginning of the campaign, though - they'd likely have done better. They've also clearly had a hard time explaining to people what it's for, which is a pity. I don't think the 16 core version by itself is all that interesting from a performance point of view, but I'm interested in the architecture in the hope that they manage to pull of the 64 core version and larger. EDIT: It's added $20k in the hour since I wrote this - happily it looks like it's got a good chance to succeed.

bhickey 14y ago

Hasn't Amazon already done this with EC2? (Edit: Written in response to the title.)

vidarh 14y ago
Huh? How does this have anything to do with EC2? Parallella is an dual core ARM board with an FPGA and a 16 core Epiphany CPU (full general purpose CPU cores with 32k static RAM built into each core - all the cores can access the memory of all other cores as well as system RAM). 1GB RAM total. Expected size around a credit card or so. The main purpose is the Epiphany CPU, which they also have a 64 core version of. Their problem is that their current CPU's are produced using a process that gives them very low yields and very high per-CPU cost. The main goal of the bounty is to enable them to switch to a much higher yield process and bring the per-chip cost of the 16 core version down to a few dollars per chip. Their long term roadmap is boards with 1000+ cores.
wmf 14y ago
Yeah, the cloud is much more accessible "for everyone" than this chip. If you want to learn parallel programming rent a GPU instance.
- vidarh 14y ago
  A GPU has a totally different architecture and programming model. It is interesting for very different types of uses.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Who rents GPUs?

pbharrin 14y ago

I think the market is telling these guys: We don't care about computing power. People are getting by with iPads and Chromebooks powered by ARM cores with 1/8 the computing power of an Intel processor. Don't get me wrong if you want to play around with parallel computing you should love this, and support it. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't reach Pebble funding levels.

amalag 14y ago
They want to enable small scale computers to do more powerful computations, i don't think it is directly for ipad's and chromebooks, it could be useful for something like a quadcopter where there is a algorithm that gives better stability but needs more computational power.
wmf 14y ago
They're actually providing much less computing power than even a low-end PC.

polyfractal 14y ago

Could someone explain how this is different from GPU computing and regular multi-core CPU computing? I realize there is a difference...but I'm not quite sure I grasp it yet. GPU computing is a lot of parallel math computations with limited shared memory. I'm assuming the Epiphany CPU is more capable than the simple GPU math units? How's it different from multi-core CPUs? Just the sheer quantity of cores they have packed in there?

vidarh 14y ago
It's closer to regular multi-core CPU computing than GPU computing. It's general purpose cores. What sets it apart is that the cores are tiny, with little per-core memory (though all cores can transparently access each-others memory as well as main memory), and so the architecture is well suited for scaling up the number of cores with quite low power consumption. So for problems that can be parallelized reasonably well, but with more complex data dependencies than what a GPU is good for, this might be a good fit. I'd put it somewhere in the middle between GPU's (for embarrassingly parallel tasks) and general purpose CPU's with high throughput per core. Also, this looks like it'd be possible to fit in the power envelope of really small embedded systems, like e.g. cellphones and tablets.... Before more developers have these systems, it'll be hard to say how useful they'll be, but the architecture looks exciting. That's why I supported it - I really want to see how this type of architecture can be exploited, and whether or not it'll prove to be cost effective and/or simpler to work with than GPU's for the right type of problems.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ArchD 14y ago
Typical multicore CPUs don't have nearly as many cores as Parallella. Also, from what I can from www.apteva.com/introduction, the power consumption is much lower and the interconnect is different. In Parallella, cores are laid out in a grid and cores can only talk directly to their neighbors.
DeepDuh 14y ago
I've done my master thesis on GPGPU, so maybe I can help out a bit. I'm not yet too familiar with Epiphany's design however. From what I could grasp what sets them apart the most is a different memory architecture compared to multicore CPUs, where the individual cores seem to be optimized for accessing adjacent memory locations as well as the locations of the direct neighbors. This is one point where the architecture seems to be similar to GPUs, although GPUs have a very different memory architecture again - for the programmer it might look similar however, especially when using OpenCL. The main point where Epiphany is diverging from GPUs is that the individual cores are complete RISC environments. This could mainly be a big plus when it comes to branching and subprocedure calls (although NVIDIA is catching up on the later point with Kepler 2). On GPUs the kernel subprocedures currently all need to be inlined and branches mean that the cores that aren't executing the current branch are just sleeping - Epiphany cores seem to be more independent in that regard. I still expect an efficient programming model to be along the same lines as CUDA/OpenCL for epiphany however - which is a good thing btw., this model has been very successful in the high performance community and it's actually quite easy to understand - much easier than cache optimizing for CPU for example. If we compare epiphany to CPU what's mainly missing is the CPU's cache architecture, hyperthreading, long pipelines per core, SSE on each core, possibly out-of-order and intricate branch prediction (not sure on those last ones). The missing caches might be a bit of a problem. The memory bandwidth they specify seems pretty good to me, but from personal experience I'd add another 20-30% to the achievable bandwidth if you have a good cache (which GPU has since Fermi for example). The other simplifications I actually like a lot - to me it makes much more sense to have a massive parallel system where you can just specify everything as scalar instead of doing all the SSE and hyperthreading hoops like on CPUs - optimizing for CPU is quite a pain compared to those new models.

eigenrick 14y ago

It's a shame they're not making something useless like a video game. Then they'd have millions.

lonetech 14y ago
Video games is exactly where heterogenous computers like this have flourished. But they don't have a game to market it yet - historically it hasn't even mattered much if that initial game used the platform anywhere near well. How did the Ouya sell, for instance? (It really resembles a Nexus 7 with a broken screen.)

mendocino 14y ago

> we see a critical need for a truly open, high-performance computing platform > FAQ: Will you open source the Epiphany chips? > Not initially, but it may be considered in the future. Well, that makes it a lot less interesting than I hoped it would be.

vidarh 14y ago
You were hoping for what exactly? VHDL/Verilog for the chips? Netlists? For most people I'd assume the main thing is that the architecture is well documented and open, as well as the board, and they have released all of the architecture documentation and a lot of other material. As much as it'd be great to have a market in other sources for the chips, unless/until the architecture has some traction that is pretty irrelevant.

rrreese 14y ago

Several commenters and the OP, seem to think that this Kickstarter will fail. Having backed quite few Kickstarter campaigns, and watched a lot more, this seems unlikely. Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed. It seems that many people delay backing till the last minute. Possibly this is just human nature, though the Kickstarter process also means that as the project progresses more information is released in a steady stream, and often new funding levels are created. Additionally backers who really want the project to succeed raise their pledges to help the project succeed.

mikepurvis 14y ago
And no big project like this would ever fail by < $50,000. Wouldn't the founders or their investors or whatever just max their credit cards to see it through? Does Kickstarter explicitly prohibit such things?

jws 14y ago

At some point in the next 24 hours, the backers who signed up for one unit will need to ask themselves if they would rather have two units or zero. I can't speak for the other 1800 people in my bin, but I just decided on two.

Evbn 14y ago
Isn't that (multiples as pledge awards) a direct violation of the letter and spirit of kickstarters new rules?

almost 14y ago

Only $99 for the first reward that actually will come with a board to play with. Sounds good to me! I've added $119 (international shipping!) to the total, hope they make it...

dkhenry 14y ago

While I am happy to see another post for this on the front page, I would have preferred a positive post. People jump on bandwagons I would rather we started a positive bandwagon rather then one looking to find the shovels and a decent grave for a awesome project

kemiller 14y ago
For what it's worth, this is the first I've heard of it, and this convinced me to contribute.

nilsimsa 14y ago

If the current trend rate continues, they should be able to reach their goal. If they could somehow get on the Reddit front page it would easily happen. I think there are many who might be interested if they only knew. Here is the trend graph: http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...

dannnnnnny 14y ago

Argh! I get paid in a couple of days! I was hoping the cash would go into my account before this runs out. Looks like that might not happen now.... Why couldn't you have given us another few days? Oh well. I bet it'll get funded.

incision 14y ago

I seem to recall repeatedly reading that Kickstarter projects collect he majority of their funding in the first 72 and final 24 hours. My anecdotal experience backing and following half a dozen projects agrees with this. I'd be quite surprised if this project doesn't make it.

joshuafcole 14y ago

I did my part. I'm very much the archetypal broke college student at the moment, but I won't always be. I have big plans in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning sectors, and I can't imagine a better, cheaper solution to get started on working with multi-agent systems. I desperately want to see this sort of pricing for cluster computing available in the future, when I have the scratch and knowledge necessary to make these ideas into products. I think that future is worth skipping the occasional movie or meal to pay into, and I'm looking forward to my somewhat unexpected end of year gift.

Evbn 14y ago
Here is one cheaper solution: simulate a multi agent system on your laptop. You don't need parallel hardware to ave multiple agents.

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GregBuchholz 14y ago

Has anyone played with the 144-core GreenArray's IC? http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/

jws 14y ago
GreenArrays are intriguing, but a completely different animal from this computer. The GreenArrays compute nodes are microscopic by comparison. Think 256 bytes of storage, shared with instructions and data. If you can map your problem on to them they seem very efficient.

converging 14y ago

It's alive. Alive! Adapteva reached their target; right now they are at $769,996 pledged with a $750,000 goal, which was cleared on october 27th between 2 and 3 am. Not sure what (US) timezone this refers to. Source: http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone http://canhekick.it/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomp...), 13.700 projects graphed). Great project, Daniel. Did not delve into past performance of kickstarter projects, but comments from across the net seem to confirm rrreese's comment: "Backing is concentrated very heavily in the first three days and the last three. Projects that have reached 80% of their funding goal by the last three days are extremely likely to succeed." Canhekickit states several todo's, of which aggregates and prediction would be especially useful. Any comments on how the funding dynamic of future kickstarter/other crowdfunding projects would be affected if this data would be available?

laacz 14y ago

I wonder, if this was elaborate reverse engeneering of hn crowd to reach Parallella financing target :)

Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago

Well, they made it and more: Funding: $788,138 of $750,000