LFCS: A $99 not supercomputer

Posted May 9, 2013 22:13 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205)
In reply to: LFCS: A $99 *not* supercomputer by daglwn
Parent article: LFCS: A $99 supercomputer

> But as far as I can tell Andreas never claimed Parallella is a
> supercomputer and neither should anyone else.

Hmm, that's been said quite a few different places, by Jim Zemlin in the introduction of Andreas for one, as well as:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a...

which is the kickstarter, titled:

Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone

I can't say for sure that Andreas wrote that, but one would guess he could at least have put a stop to it if he wanted.

And the board does have:

> processor, memory, network, I/O, software

perhaps not in sufficient quantity/quality for your taste, however.

jake

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LFCS: A $99 not supercomputer

Posted May 10, 2013 21:40 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link] (2 responses)

> I can't say for sure that Andreas wrote that, but one would guess he could
> at least have put a stop to it if he wanted.

It's too bad if Andreas is pushing this view. It's misleading.

> And the board does have:
> processor, memory, network, I/O, software

Well of course it does. It is a computer system after all.

> perhaps not in sufficient quantity/quality for your taste, however.

It's not about my taste at all. Ask anyone in HPC. The fact that processor, memory, network, I/O and software are robust, tightly coupled and highly tuned is what separates a supercomputer from a cluster and from Parallella.

Just as one example, GigE is nowhere near enough to handle climate simulations, modeling stars and analyzig combustion. It's not just about bandwidth and latency.

LFCS: A $99 not supercomputer

Posted May 11, 2013 13:26 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course, there's no way that anything faster than GigE can be used in anything even remotely consumer-grade until it gets a bit cheaper. I considered going to 10GbE on the local net a while back, but looked at the prices, screamed, and decided maybe in ten years or when I win the lottery. Just a simple four-port switch was several thousand pounds!

LFCS: A $99 not supercomputer

Posted May 13, 2013 18:08 UTC (Mon) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link]

"It's not just about bandwidth and latency."