{"id":3608,"date":"2015-12-12T19:06:07","date_gmt":"2015-12-12T18:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/supercomputing-with-the-parallella-board\/"},"modified":"2018-02-15T11:07:39","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T10:07:39","slug":"supercomputing-with-the-parallella-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/supercomputing-with-the-parallella-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Supercomputing with the Parallella board"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some twenty years ago I set up a company to configure <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Parallel_computing\">parallel computers<\/a> for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Image_processing\">image processing<\/a> applications. Unfortunately, demand wasn\u2019t very high because of the poor <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Price\/performance_ratio\">price\/performance ratio<\/a> and the advent of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Transputer\">RISC processors<\/a> which surpassed it. I was therefore very excited when about a year ago <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adapteva.com\/\">Adapteva<\/a> created a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/adapteva\/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone\">kickstarter project<\/a> to offer affordable parallel computing to everyone. While I didn\u2019t sign up for the kickstarter project I did order a p<a href=\"http:\/\/shop.adapteva.com\/collections\/featured-products\/products\/parallella-16-micro-server\">arallella board<\/a> through their shop. The board took quite sometime to arrive but is now running quite happily on my desk.<\/p>\n<p>The Parallella Computer<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adapteva.com\/parallella-board\/\">Parallella<\/a> is a credit card sized computer that includes a dual-core ARM A9 CPU, a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and a 16 or 64-core <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adapteva.com\/products\/epiphany-ip\/epiphany-architecture-ip\/\">Epiphany coprocessor<\/a>. The Parallella is an extremely versatile platform that can be used as a standalone computer, an embedded device, or a component in a supercomputer architecture.<\/p>\n<p><img style=\"display: block; margin: 3px auto;\" src=\"\/images\/galerie\/12.12.2015.CPU\/cpu1.png\" alt=\"cpu1\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #3366ff;\">The Epiphany Coprocessor<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Epiphany multicore coprocessor is a scalable shared memory architecture, featuring up to 4,096 processors on a single chip connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network. Each Epiphany processor core includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a tiny high performance floating point RISC designed specifically for multicore processing;<\/li>\n<li>a high bandwidth local memory system;<\/li>\n<li>an extensive set of built in hardware features for multicore communication.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Epiphany coprocessor is ANSI-C and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/OpenCL\">OpenCL<\/a> programmable and works in cooperation with standard microprocessors to provide an unprecedented level of real-time processing performance and power consumption. This makes the device ideal for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.<\/p>\n<p><img style=\"margin: 3px auto; display: block;\" src=\"\/images\/galerie\/12.12.2015.CPU\/cpu2.png\" alt=\"cpu2\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #3366ff; text-decoration: underline;\">Applications<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The list of possible applications is quite large and included below. Consumer:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Smart-phones and tablet app acceleration<\/li>\n<li>High end audio<\/li>\n<li>Computational photography<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Speech_recognition\">Speech Recognition<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Face detection\/recognition<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Computing Infrastructure:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Super Computers<\/li>\n<li>Big Data Analytics<\/li>\n<li>Software Defined Networking<\/li>\n<li>Data-center Appliances<\/li>\n<li>High Frequency Trading<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mil\/Aero:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Radar\/Sonar<\/li>\n<li>Extremely Large Sensor Imaging<\/li>\n<li>Hyperspectral Imaging<\/li>\n<li>Communication Jamming<\/li>\n<li>Military Radios<\/li>\n<li>Munitions\/Guidance<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Medical:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ultrasound<\/li>\n<li>CT<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Communication:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Communication test-bed<\/li>\n<li>Software defined radio<\/li>\n<li>Adaptive Pre-distortion<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Industrial\/Instrumentation:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Machine Vision<\/li>\n<li>Autonomous Robots\/Navigation<\/li>\n<li>Automotive Safety<\/li>\n<li>High Speed Data Acquisition\/Generation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Other:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Compression<\/li>\n<li>Security Cameras<\/li>\n<li>Video Transcoding<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><strong>Anrew Ritz<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some twenty years ago I set up a company to configure parallel computers for image processing applications. Unfortunately, demand wasn\u2019t very high because of the poor price\/performance ratio and the advent of RISC processors which surpassed it. I was therefore very excited when about a year ago Adapteva created a kickstarter project to offer affordable [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[599,595],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3723,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions\/3723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whystory.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}