Hacker News Reader

Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

No, the @home stuff is leveraging thousands and millions of computers. You have 18. From the slides you linked, the Epiphany board is 27x slower than a Xeon, so your distributed supercomputer is about as fast as a single desktop with a core i7, assuming you have perfect scaling.

View on HN

The slide stated that one Epiphany core is 27 times slower than one Xeon core. clearly the goal here is to ramp..the 324 cores all came online today. If we don't get to >10,000 cores, then the effort has failed.

792 so far now :)

Will you send out any test load before May 30? Would be better to see those cores to work if they are online, otherwise it feels kinda wasted. Wouldn't be surprised if people go offline after a while if there's no work done.

So, I'm confused. That slide says 64 cores, but the Parallella board website says 18. Which is it? You really need a proper benchmark.

Another question: how are you planning to implement fault tolerance? If you're running across hundreds of nodes via the internet, the probability of one failing while my job is running is high. Are you going to run a fault-tolerant scheduler?

And: how are you going to do file I/O? Does the user have to run the master MPI process on his/her own machine and do I/O there?

I think the 18 is counting 16 Epiphany cores plus 2 cores on the Zynq. The 64 is referring to a 64 core Epiphany chip that has only been made in prototype quantities, so far as I know.

This is exactly the same concept as @Home, just with the Parallella board. He will have thousands of those boards in the computing grid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com