$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-touted-in-kickstarter-project/

by suprgeek • 14 years ago

59 59 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

Hopefully not a silly question, but would it make sense to mine bitcoins with something like this, or are GPUs still more effective?

EwanToo2• 14 years ago

This has got less floating point calculation power than a single mid-range Intel processor, let alone a high end GPU that people use for bitcoin mining.

wmf• 14 years ago

Bitcoin mining is pure integer, actually.

rmc• 14 years ago

GPUs have been the only real cost effective way to mine bitcoins for a while now.

ralph• 14 years ago

See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583263 for comments though it links straight to Kickstarter, and not Ars Technica.

ukoki• 14 years ago

Sounds good. I have an issue with the "45GHz" claim though - it's kind of like saying your collection of cars can go 2000 mph - you're not actually getting anywhere faster.

abcd_f4• 14 years ago

Car analogy is off.

Going from A to B is exactly an example of a task that can't be solved in parallel fashion. On the other hand, if you needed to merely cover N miles, then a pool of cars would work just fine.

josephlord2• 14 years ago

Many computing problems can't be parallelised and in almost all there are dependencies and synchronisation issues that mean a single double speed CPU is almost always better than two normal ones. Exception might be that when a buggy programme gets locked in a tight loop it will only be able to take half the resources.

To use another car analogy. Counting clock speed is like counting the cars max RPM instead of actually measuring the performance. And then they have totalled the max RPM figures as if they have have 90,000RPM engine.

danbee• 14 years ago

Actually it can. If you have 16 people to move and 1 car that seats 4 it will take 4 round trips. 4 cars will do it in 1 one way trip.

People = threads and cars = cores.

laumars4• 14 years ago

You missed his point. Clock frequencies cannot be combined as it's a measure of the frequency a single core operates at - not how many operations per second can be processed. This is why multi-core CPUs don't say 8GHz even though they have 4x 2GHz cores.

archangel_one6• 14 years ago

Ugh. They keep using the term "gigahertz", and it does not mean what they think it means. Having 16 800MHz boards does not mean that you have anything running at 13GHz; it's nonsensical to combine it that way, as any high school science student could tell them.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate the product, but it really does put me off it. If they're going to market a product like that it's going to be to a pretty techy crowd and they should get their terminology right.

UnoriginalGuy3• 14 years ago

While I agree that 16x800 Mhz is more accurate than 13 Ghz; I wouldn't say they got the terminology "wrong."

A lot of companies are using the combined totals to tell how fast/big/etc something is. It isn't even a recent development either.

Just for one example, if you go to Dell's store right now you'll find computers with 8 GB of RAM; but what they fail to tell you is that that is 2x4 GB sticks rather than 1x8 GB stick. So it is actually the "total" RAM in the machine.

Now you might argue that for technical reasons there is a difference between how RAM and CPU-cores are exposed to the underlying software, but that within its self is only true in some infrastructural designs, but not true in others (e.g. Sometimes two cores pretend to be one, sometimes a single core pretends to be two).

Achshar• 14 years ago

Kind of off topic but is there any major performance difference between 8x1 and 2x4 RAMs?

laumars4• 14 years ago

That not really the same though. Hz is a scale of the frequency of a CPU core. So it's not even a gauge of the execution speed of a CPU. You can't really multiply the cores together as the frequency hasn't increased, you've only increased the parallel capabilities (case in point, multi-core CPUs are rated per core, not cumulatively).

RAM, however, can be added together as data can be cached across one or more sticks. Thus adding another stick of RAM does increase the overall total amount of RAM available.

I'm not an expert on this, but I believe this is why clusters are measured in calculations per second (eg FLOPS) rather than frequencies. Calculations run in parallel (such as clusters do) are increasing the overall number of calculations performed per second. Where as multiple cores running in parallel don't increase the clock frequency.

wheels• 14 years ago

The RAM example is terrible. Accumulating RAM is application-transparent. Processor accumulation is not.

Two small shovels aren't the same as one big shovel, but two small bags of dirt are basically the same as one big bag of dirt. If you're going to continue with the memory analogy, this would be like combining the graphics memory and general purpose RAM into a single figure.

bane• 14 years ago

Think of it this way. If I have 1 2-gallon bucket or 2 1-gallon buckets (or 4 half-gallon buckets), I still have 2 gallons of carrying capacity.

But if I watch 1 clock for 60 seconds, the amount of time that has passed is exactly the same as if I watch 2 clocks for 60 seconds or 100 clocks for 60 seconds.

hippich• 14 years ago

I believe this was used to allow to compare performance of their offer with other products. I do not think they were trying to fool any of their potential customers who should easily understand what they are talking about.

This might fool non-tech people, but non-tech people will not buy this product anyway.

archangel_one6• 14 years ago

Just to clarify, I don't think they were trying to "fool" customers; if nothing else, surely nobody would believe that a genuine 13GHz chip is suddenly going to appear via Kickstarter. It just annoys me as a way of describing performance of their device; as someone else suggested, total FLOPS would have been a much better metric.

replax• 14 years ago

Even worse is, that in their kickstarter video they even say that the "old way" of increasing processor frequency does not work anymore and we therefore have to scale the amount of cores.

It does not make any sense at all for them to add the numbers up, aside from being able to present a huge single number for marketing purposes. Even non tech people understand that a 4 x 2ghz processor is not a 8ghz processor....

DanBC• 14 years ago

> Even non tech people understand that a 4 x 2ghz processor is not a 8ghz processor..

Having spoken to a few non-tech people I'm pretty sure that I could find a bunch who don't understand anything in that sentence.

Having spoken to some supposedly tech-savvy children on 4chan /g/ I know that there's a lot of confusion about cores and processors and speed, and that's before you talk about potential benefits and disbenefits.

flurpitude2• 14 years ago

By their reckoning, a 3GHz i5 or i7 with 4 cores would be a 12GHz processor. Not so different from their promised "13GHz". Their hype makes me suspicious.

rm9993• 14 years ago

It's not actually hz, it's cycles * hz, which is cycles per second. Cycles are additive: 1 cycle + 1 cycle = 2 cycles (in the same way that you get twice as many cycles in 2 seconds as you would in 1 second). We probably all prefer FLOPs/sec, but conceptually they are actually very similar - number of operations = number of clocks * number of operations per clock. Number of operations per clock isn't changing when you add more cores, so if you have a problem with summing clocks you should have a problem with summing FLOPs.

As incredibly misleading as it is, our objections may largely come from preconceived notions of what a hz is. We want it to be a function of a single core because that's how we grew up thinking about it.

archangel_one6• 14 years ago

Yes, my objection comes from a preconceived notion of what a Hz is, because it is the SI unit of frequency - so it has an internationally standardised meaning which you're meant to be able to rely on! In the same way, when I buy a 9V battery, I rely on my preconceived notion of what a volt is, and that's always worked out okay so far.

nl• 14 years ago

Increasingly in the server space people use processor cycles additively (is that a word?) because to some degree you can work out how many vCPUs a physical server configuration will give you by adding the clock cycles of all the processors.

It's not perfect - but is a lot easier than dealing with having to look up Intel CPU numbers to see how many cores it has, then multiplying that by the clock speed, then guessing. Getting the total cycles means you can jump straight to the guessing ("estimating") part.

EwanToo2• 14 years ago

It's just misleading nonsense to call this a supercomputer, with or without the quotes around it.

I dug out this article from 2007 about building a 26 gigaflops "supercomputer" called the Microwulf Supercomputer which cost under $2500 [1].

And according to Intel [2], the Intel i5-650 processor can do 25.6 GFLOPs.

This is just the worst kind of kickstarter marketing.

1 - http://www.geekologie.com/2007/09/supercomputer-does-26-giga...

2 - http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei5/sb/core_...

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

There are GPUs that can do a teraflop, so yes, 26 gigaflops is terribly unimpressive. There are some areas that can't be easily handled by a GPU, but those are mainly bandwidth-limited, which wouldn't be improved by this architecture.

The defining feature of this proposal is their 70 gigaflops/watt number, which is impressive. But that doesn't make it a suitable target for hobbyists. Hobbyists who want to play with supercomputing for cheap should just use their existing video card.

astrodust• 14 years ago

Even a relatively commodity card costing $100 can do 1 teraflop with the higher-end cards already pushing beyond 8 teraflops.

The days of a gigaflop being an impressive unit of measurement are surely over.

swansong• 14 years ago

Absolutely loving the 4MB jpeg on the homepage.

Seriously though, this sounds amazing :)

icelancer• 14 years ago

Interesting, but a laughably high funding goal. No chance they hit $750k.

chubot2• 14 years ago

I don't get why it has only 1GB of RAM to go with all those cores. Doesn't that drastically limit the potential applications?

It doesn't sound like they have compelling applications in mind -- they're kind of throwing it out there to see what people will do with it. But there are only a few things that needs so much computation and so little memory. Even a lot of scientific computing today is more like "big data" than "big compute".

Also, it seems obvious that you'll want to use more than one together, so some info about network connectivity would be useful.

UnoriginalGuy3• 14 years ago

It is a compute device. I presume the use would be any scenario where you want a very fast, very concurrent, calculation engine but one that doesn't depend on an extremely large data set.

One random example I can think of would be cracking encryption and or hashes (without the use of rainbow tables or similar).

Your entire comment essentially seems to be "I don't think a usage scenario exists, because I cannot think of any, so why didn't they make it a 'large data' device instead of a compute device?!" which seems more a limitation on yourself than the device its self.

chubot2• 14 years ago

No, my comment is: what are some of those applications? If your answer is that it's for running quadratic or exponential algorithms on medium-size data sets, then that explains a lot.

The relatively few applications explains why they are using Kickstarter for funding. If it had more applications, then people with deep pockets would be falling over themselves to give them money.

There's nothing wrong with this -- the page is just so full of marketing-speak that it's hard to tell.

jlebrech• 14 years ago

So if those boards have the same performance of an i5 cpu (25GigaFlops) can they be clustered together to reach a higher amount, say would 10 of them produce 450 GigaFlops?

femto• 14 years ago

Has anyone tried building something about a GreenArray [1]? 144 computers per chip, $20 per chip in with an MOQ of 10. I'm not affiliated with them. It just sounds like an interesting chip, and I'm curious whether there is a reason not to buy some for experimentation.

[1] http://www.greenarraychips.com/

norswap• 14 years ago

> The Kickstarter page went live today. A pledge of $99 guarantees supporters a 16-core board by May 2013, while a pledge of $499 guarantees delivery by February. The current hardware is in the prototype phase.

sigh There is no guarantee on Kickstarters.

cgayle• 14 years ago

For 99$, I would give this a try

ajdecon• 14 years ago

Calling this a "supercomputer" is a misnomer (though it's a sexy one), because it makes people expect real high performance. As many have pointed out, a single GPU could beat this thing easily in terms of performance. It's really a dev platform for shared-memory parallel computing, mimicking some types of supercomputer architectures... which isn't to say it's not awesome.

I've seen similar projects in the distributed-memory space (tiny clusters like Limulus[1], MicroWulf[2], or LittleFe[3]). These things are great for educational purposes, and the low cost makes them a lot of fun for classes and workshops. LittleFe, for example, supports distributed-memory and GPGPU programming and teaches you about clusters, and the educational program at the Supercomputing conference lets some educators build one and take it home for free.

But for professional work, I think a workstation-class PC, maybe with a GPU, is always going to win out.

[1] http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/ [2] http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ [3] http://littlefe.net/

duskwuff• 14 years ago

Looks like their prototype is based on a Xilinx Zynq dev board from Digilent:

https://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=ZEDBOAR...

No idea what's hiding on the FMC daughterboard, though.

$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project

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