Thanks to another heroic integration effort from Ola Jeppsson, we now have a much improved Parallella Linux Distribution based on Ubuntu 15.04. (Note the name change from “pubuntu” to “parabuntu”) Here’s a selection of some of the pre-installed features: HDMI improvements (Thanks to Peter Saunderson and Ola Jeppsson) GDB Epiphany multicore support (Thanks to Pedro Alvez) EPYTHON parallel programming framework…
Splitting problems up into tasks and running these concurrently over a number of cores is a popular approach to parallelism. In recent years this has becoming more and more popular and is seen as one of the ways in which parallel codes might be written for future machines with very large numbers of processing cores. In this tutorial we are…
I am happy to report that we have successfully taped out a 1024-core Epiphany-V RISC processor chip at 16nm. The chip has 4.5 Billion transistors, which is 36% more transistors than Apple’s latest 4 core A10 processor at roughly the same die size. Compared to leading HPC processors, the chip demonstrates an 80x advantage in processor density and a 3.6x advantage in memory…
In the previous tutorial (available here) we looked at splitting a problem up geometrically. Driven by the decomposition of the data, different parts of the problem ran on different Epiphany cores with these cores often needing to communuicate when a neighbouring value held on another core was required. Whilst geometric decomposition is a very common approach not all problems are…
In the previous tutorial (here) we concentrated on different ways to pass messages between cores which is one of the core mechanisms of parallelism. We saw that messages can be point to point, where only two cores are involved, or collective where every core is involved. The forms of communication that you select depends upon the problem you are trying…
This is the first of a number of tutorials where we are going to explore the parallel capabilities of the Epiphany and develop some parallel codes which illustrate the techniques used by HPC programmers to write large scale parallel codes on modern supercomputers. In this post we will concentrate on the mechanisms of parallelism, and one fundamental activity is the…
Ola Jeppsson has been very busy over the last few months pulling together and updating all the components for a major new Parallella headless SDK release. Those of you looking for the latest Ubuntu, Linux, GCC, and GDB will appreciate this release. Key updates include: Ubuntu 15.04 (stock linaro) Linux kernel 4.4 (stock) GCC 5.2 GDB 7.10 The new and improved…
Given how important chips are to modern society EVERYONE should understand and appreciate how they are made. Every field has its own set of terms, jargon, and acronyms (engineers love acronyms!). As you would expect, chip design is no different. If you are new to chip design, it might take you a few days to read through the Wikipedia entries for each one of…
[UPDATE 3/8/2016 We were not accepted into GSOC, but the Fossi Foundation has graciously agreed to take us under their wings. We will be accepting applications for the RISC-V and SDR projects] We are applying to 2016 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. Below you will find a list of initial project ideas. If you are interested in…
By far the most amazing Parallella hobby project to date has been together by Patrick Cazeles from France! Patrick has put together a miniaturized “super hi-fi” jukebox. The box on the top is Patrick’s Parallella work, the box on the bottom in the picture is his old digital power amplifier. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at the last Parallella…
