[Beowulf] El Reg: AMD reveals potent parallel processing breakthrough

[Vincent Diepeveen]

You find it a cool idea to learn students how to drive a moped and to  
steer well with a moped
in order to let them understand the problems of how to fly an  
airplane, meanwhile at home they got a car?

They will never respect you in this manner, and they are da*** right  
doing that.


On May 11, 2013, at 7:39 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

>
>
> On 5/11/13 9:55 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>>
>> On May 11, 2013, at 6:29 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/11/13 2:06 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I don't think a Arduino cluster is something you would build to do
>>> actual
>>> computation. Just imagine.. All those little 18MHz CPUs with their
>>> 16 bit
>>> integer CPU just merrily spinning away.
>>>
>>> You'd do it to fool with cluster interconnect topologies, simple
>>> parallelism, experimenting with fault tolerance when a link
>>> disappears,
>>> and stuff like that. Particularly in an educational setting,  
>>> where you
>>> could fairly inexpensively set up 20 or 30 people with a 15-20 node
>>> cluster.
>>>
>>
>> From educational viewpoint a cluster out of low clocked cpu's that
>> are slower
>> than the bandwidth it has, is completely wasted time and utter  
>> useless.
>
>
>
> My original Arudino cluster (arduwulf?) was to use serial interfaces,
> either SPI or UART (or even big banging UART).  That would be  
> nicely slow.
>
> I don't know that the speed of the CPU vs speed of interconnect is all
> that relevant for educational purposes.  You could quite easily try
> different communications topologies, look at ways to propagate data  
> across
> the cluster, investigate fault tolerance, etc.
>
> Maybe more of a "networking" experimental platform.
>
>>
>> Get something better for your money there :)
>
>
> Hard to beat $19/node plus the cost of some wire and maybe a USB  
> hub to
> talk to them all. http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html
> rPi is in the same price range
>
>
>
> So, for, say, $200-300, you could give a student a platform with 8-10
> nodes made from off the shelf widgets that they could do work on.   
> At that
> price, you're in "expensive textbook" territory, and the student  
> might be
> able to afford it.
>
> A class of 30 would only be $10k, which is down in the "discretionary"
> budget territory.
>
> You could write a library that provides MPI-like or sockets-like
> interfaces, as well.
>
>
> I don't know that you could get there with any sort of standard PC  
> based
> scheme. I've been getting some Atom based mobos for about $90 each
> recently, but you still need to add a power supply. You'd probably  
> boot
> off the net so you don't need a disk drive.
>
> And then there's the physical size issue.  Put together a cluster of 8
> mini-itx mobos and you're looking at a fairly large pile of  
> hardware. You
> would, of course, be able to run vanilla Linux on them.  If you're  
> using
> off the shelf stuff (I.e. Not making a 8 way ATX power supply), it's
> probably $100/node by the time you're done, so it's now a $800-1000  
> cost.
>
> That's high enough to be above the "it might be fun to try" threshold.
>
> It kind of depends on the pedagogical objectives..
>
>
>
>>
>
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