The Scottish Boinc Team

PinkPenguin wrote:Presumably the 64 core Epiphany IV version won't be available for some time yet. 8)

PinkPenguin wrote:Need to keep an eye open for Boinc ports although one could try recompiling BOINC using the SDK and gcc compiler supplied. Used to do this when installing BOINC on Linux. Likely to be a bit painful though as I doubt this works "out of the box" as it were.

Janos wrote: I have read that they would work out of the box on the Arm cores only but would need a lot of extra coding for them to work on the 16 core epiphany cores. However, I have also read that several of the BOINC developers are actively working on a ports. I think by the end of this year we will we looking at a new top end BOINC platform.

Interesting times ahead.

Megacruncher wrote:This sounds very promising.

If a hypothetical well-funded cruncher of limited programming ability were to buy one of the 4 board clusters would they at very least have an 8 core low heat cruncher almost out of the box?

If so, that, even with only an outside chance of it turning into a cool budget supercomputer, would be enough reason to place an order.

Silver wrote:Hope they come through eventually as I had hoped that a cluster of these would power me through the ranks....

Janos wrote:

Silver wrote:Hope they come through eventually as I had hoped that a cluster of these would power me through the ranks....

Same :)

Janos wrote:My board is up and running. Currently crunching on the 2 ARM cores only and waiting for projects to support the Epiphany cores.

Not expecting the ARM cores to be particularly fast but every little helps :)

                                	Raspberry Pi	    CubieBoard 2      Desktop
Floating Point Operations            237.89               456.98          2049.30
Integer Operations	                955.20              1718.00          5868.06
Float Ratio to Pi	                   1                    1.92             8.61
Integer Ratio to Pi	                 1                    1.80             6.14
Float Ratio to Cubie		                                  1                4.48
Integer Ratio to Cubie		                                1                3.42

Andreas Olofsson wrote:Hi there,

If you own a Parallella please help us build the most efficient virtual supercomputer in the world this week!

Who, what, where, when, why?

http://supercomputer.io

Thanks to the amazing folks at resin.io there is now a containerized application deployment platform for the Parallella board enabling super easy workload scheduling for a fleet of thousands of Parallella across the globe with the push of a button.

We intend to offer "supercomputer.io" capacity for free to academic researchers working in the field of machine learning. Researchers at Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are making steady progress with deep learning algorithms thanks to virtually limitless resources. What if this kind of computing power could be available to all researchers for FREE?

If we can get 1,000 boards connected to supercomputer.io, researchers would have a 18,000 CPU supercomputer at their disposal, putting it in the same class as some of the computers on the Top500 while consuming less than 5 KW. With 2 ARM A9 cores, the Xilinx FPGA logic, and 16 Epiphany CPU cores, this would arguably be the most efficient supercomputer on the planet!

The first live image processing demo of this new virtual machine will be run at the Parallella Technical Conference in Tokyo this Saturday.

How to Help?

Based on conversation with countless Parallella owners over the last year, I can tell you that "time" is a scarce a commodity as ever. If you haven't turned on your Parallella yet, PLEASE help us put it to good use! Too much time and money was spent for the Parallellas to gather dust in some desk drawer. Let's at least build something useful out of it.

Download the special resin.io image from http://supercomputer.io
Burn an SD card
Power up your Parallella and connect it to your router. We take care of the rest.

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