AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer | Hacker News Reader

AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer

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65 pointsluu12 comments

I really love this. I made a similar thing back in 2000:

http://www.clustercompute.com/

We had landed a job to compress tens of thousands of CDs to mp3 for a dutch broadcasting corporation and doing it on a single machine would have taken years at the speed mp3 compressors were running in those days (Fraunhofer reference code).

Doing it on this stack of boards got the job done in under two months.

Nowhere near as just-because-I-can as the linked article though.

For those interested in a video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrQJxCDrfrY

Thanks! He's hooked up the Applecrate I and II to make it into a 25 machine ubercrate

Sorta tempted to do something similar in arduino-land to solve a processing problem I am having...

Use a http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32... instead of arduino, 192k of ram and a floating point unit.

Maple might be a good option too; Arduino-style STM32! http://leaflabs.com/devices/

Great for Arduino compatibility but those don't have floating point units.

Floating point is exactly the problem. I am building a balancing robot.

What's the tool chain like?

I've used the Keil IDE, which is free for small projects. Takes some getting used to but great debugger and easy to get started.

There's also free Eclipse/gcc toolchains so if you're already used to Eclipse that's an easy way to get started.

All the newer ST demo boards have on-board JTAG debuggers so they're a little bigger but convenient since you just need a USB cable. External JTAG debuggers are pretty cheap and Keil (ARM) has a super-nice trace probe if you're willing to spend a little more.

I have no idea if it would be appropriate for your build, but the previously featured micropython (board) does have an fpu (and "oodles" of processing power)

https://github.com/micropython/micropython/wiki

[Oh, same series - same chip? Very similar anyway]

https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/

On Mac

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PX4/homebrew-px4/master/gc...

cool. )

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