[dundee] Parallella - The $99 Linux Supercomputer

[Robert McWilliam]

Marketing these type of things as supercomputers annoys me. The
performance of the Parallella board is 3 orders of magnitude shy of the
bottom of the top500.org list (and more than 5 below the top) so not a
supercomputer. It will outperform what was a supercomputer at some
point in the past; but so will every other computer or phone produced
today. All that changes is how far back you have to look. That might
actually be an interesting way of quoting performance: what's the most
recent top500.org list your system can outperform. In this case June
1993 was the last time it would have topped the list, but it could have
stayed on the list till November 2001.



The parallella board could be a cheap way to build what would be a
supercomputer now though: 1000 of them would put you close to being on
the top500.org list, which is very impressive for $100k (or more
realistically somewhere around $200k once you add housing, power,
cooling and interconnect).



Robert





On Thu, Apr 18, 2013, at 09:02 PM, gordon dunlop wrote:

  This might be of interest to some of you.

Adapteva CEO Andreas Olofsson gave a keynote at the Linux Collaboration
Summit, currently being in San Francisco, on the Parallella, a parallel
processing board aimed to encourage parallel programming for software
applications.

This is an article about it

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/parallella-the-99-linux-supercomputer-700001403
6/

The video of this talk entitled “Kickstarting the Transition to
Parallel Computing” can be found in the Linux Foundation video archive.
Other talks from the summit should be uploaded to the video archive
over the next few weeks.

[2]http://video.linux.com/videos

Parallella kickstarter page

[3]http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercompu
ter-for-everyone

Parallella website

[4]http://www.parallella.org/

Gordon

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________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam rmcw at allmail.net www.ormiret.com

The opinions expressed herin are not necessarily those of my
employer, not necessarily mine, and probably not necessary.

References

1. http://www.zdnet.com/parallella-the-99-linux-supercomputer-7000014036/
2. http://video.linux.com/videos
3. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
4. http://www.parallella.org/
5. mailto:dundee at mailman.lug.org.uk
6. http://dundeelug.org.uk/
7. https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dundee
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