It seems that a new concept of computer is comming next month: Parallella
It comes with a Epiphany Multicore chip.
Adapteva is the company behind, it seems they lack of wide experience on putting these chips on the market but they are pushing hard with the help of KickStarter.
Some youtube videos on this subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taAG9QNWLNo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqqxTpz-hJY

What do you think of this? How do you see this compared with a Rasperry Pi cluster?

No opinnions on this?

I read a few more articles on this and there is still to see what comes out of this proyect.

I was perhaps dreaming that a VM could see every one of these boards as a GPU or a multicore CPU with spetial drivers designed for it.

From my little knowlegde even considering the latency of the ethernet it could make a very nice scalable computer. Some kind of LTSP machine or Beowulf cluster.

What I like of this "dream" is that is very scalable, power efficient and fanless (I hate the noise of the fans).

Maybe someone could ground me to earth.

PD. Even some technical liks on this would be apreciated to search more on this subject.

Thanks!

Could 4 Parallela @ $100 each do as much work as my $400 Q6600-GTX660Ti rig?

Maybe I don't understand the Parallela concept but each board has an ethernet port, HDMI port, 2 USB ports, a serial port plus JTAG port. If I were to buy 10 Parallela I would have all those ports X 10 which to me seems like a needless expense. Gamers like to have multiple monitors so I can justify 3 HDMI for certain users. So on that basis I say the idea is dumb, unless 10 of them could crunch as fast as something comparably priced, for example a GTX 780Ti in a $150 rig. Powerful and inexpensive beats dumb.
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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

I don't think it's intended to reach gammers market at all.

Could 4 Parallela @ $100 each do as much work as my $400 Q6600-GTX660Ti rig?

Maybe I don't understand the Parallela concept but each board has an ethernet port, HDMI port, 2 USB ports, a serial port plus JTAG port. If I were to buy 10 Parallela I would have all those ports X 10 which to me seems like a needless expense.

Right now these things aren't much more than toys, because the absolute performance is very low.

OK, now I see why each board needs an ethernet port... they're connected by hooking them to a router/switch? I thought they connected through a pin and header combo and kind of an 'extendable bus' sort of thing.

Regarding performance...

The only reason GTX 770 DP is that low is because NVIDIA cripples it on purpose. When not crippled the DP performance is the same as the SP performance. Titan, for example, does not have DP crippled and therefore has excellent DP performance.

Also, you have to look at more than just GLOPS when assessing performance, you must also look at the kinds of operations the device can perform. If it can only add and multiply with DP then it's not as productive at certain kinds of work as a device that can do transcendental, matrix and FFT operations (higher maths) in hardware. Does the Epiphany do higher maths and if so which ones?

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Thaks very much for your aswers, I learned a lot.

I read the Einstein thread you posted ETA. Very, very interesting. That's was exactly what I was looking for.

PD. It made me go back in time... when I programmed PIC and Motorola 68000... very long time ago... Does Asemmbler still exists?? :op

They start delivering next week. We will see soon what is up to come.

They have the first 200 boards. Start shipping.

Ericsson (the Swedish company) and Carmel Ventures (a Israeli VC firm) have made a significant investment in Adapteva of 3.6M$.

Seems this is going to be an arquitectur to watch.

An interesting demo on parallelization with Parallella.