Kickstaring the transition to parallel computing with open hardware
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Adapteva aims to address the computing energy crisis by promoting parallel computing through its Parallella platform, a $99 open-source parallel computing system. The platform is designed to be accessible for novice programmers while requiring a significant shift in the computing ecosystem, including educational reforms and rewriting existing software. Parallella has garnered strong interest with 5,000 backers and pre-sales of 6,300 boards within weeks, supporting various applications from robotics to high-performance computing.
Kickstaring the transition to parallel computing with open hardware
- 1. Inventing the Future of Computing Kickstarting the Transition to Parallel Computing With Open Hardware Andreas Olofsson andreas@adapteva.com Linux Collaboration Summit 2013 April 15th-17th, 2013 – San Francisco, CA 1
- 2. What is Adapteva? 2 Possibly the World’s Smallest Semiconductor Company 64-core 28nm 100 GFLOPS Coprocessor @2W Now Also a System Company… #1 in Processor Energy Efficiency at 50 GFLOPS/Watt
- 3. The Computing Energy Crisis: IT’S REAL!! 3 0 1 10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000 10,000,000 100,000,000 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 System Processing Needs Legacy Processing Efficiency “The Efficiency Gap” Von Neumann Saturation
- 4. The Ideal World 4 Inf B RAM CPU (Inf Hz) Inf B/sec
- 5. The Real World: Performance is Saturating! 5 4. Add Cores 3. SIMD 1. Scale Frequency Now What? 2. Multi Issue
- 6. Power Consumption Thermal Density Memory Bottlenecks Latency Wall Wiring Frequency Wall Yield Issues Time to Market Software Complexity Amdahl’s Law 10 Trends that Will Shape the Future of Computing 6
- 7. Nature is Massively Parallel 7 Efficient Robust Hetero- geneous Parallel
- 8. The Heterogeneous Computing Vision 8 SYSTEM-ON-CHIP BIG CPU FPGA BIG CPU BIG CPU BIG CPU 100’s of small RISC CPUsGPU Analog
- 9. The Current State of Parallel Programming 9 How To Make Every Programmer a Parallel Programmer? Source: Github
- 10. 10 Industry Challenges Before Us • Rebuild the computer ecosystem • Rewrite billions of lines of code • Re-educate millions of programmers • Rewrite the education curriculum
- 11. 11 No Computing Parallel Computing “Von Neumann Age” Serial Computing 1943-2013? No Electronic Computing -1943 Parallel Computing 2013-?? Any Reason to Think the Future of Computing is NOT Parallel?
- 12. What is Parallella? 12 “A $99 credit card sized parallel computing platform”
- 13. Parallella Principles 13 • PARALLEL: • Heterogeneous and scalable parallel hardware • OPEN: • Open source O/S (Linux) • Open chip documentation • Open source drivers and SDK • Open source hardware (board schematics, docs, layout) • Open standards (OpenCL, OpenMP, MPI, ...) • ACESSIBLE: • $99 starting point • Easy to use novice progammers
- 14. Parallella Kickstarter Stats 14 • ”$99 Linux supercomputer” • 5,000 backers • 6,300 boards ”pre-sold” in 4 weeks • 67 countries, all 50 US states • 50-75% of backers are developers • 5,000 more signups since Jan 1st • Customer Application Classes: • SDR (GNU Radio) • Ray tracing/rendering • Image processing • Robotics • Gaming • Cryptography • Media Server • Distributed Computing • Signal processing • HPC
- 15. The Parallella Architecture 15 Dual Core ARM A9 AXI BUS MIO SHARED DRAM “O/S” DRAM USB OTG USB 2.0 UART Ethernet SD-CARD I2C DAC/ADC IF HDMI Controller AXI-MASTER AXI-SLAVE “Glue-Logic” Daughter Card AXI-MASTER Zynq FPGA Zynq “Hard” Off-Chip MEM-CTRL “Sandbox” EPIPHANY
- 16. For the first time in public… 16 PARALLELLA-16 PARALLELLA-64 • Zynq Dual Core ARM A9 • 16-core Epiphany Accelerator • 1GB RAM • GbE, USB, HDMI, uSD • 6 GB/s expansion connectors • $99 (long term goal) • Same as PARALLELLA-16, with • 64-core Epiphany Accelerator First Parallella-16 Power-Up was at 1:30pm on April 11
- 17. Parallella Bring-up Day 1 17
- 18. Parallella Bring-up Day 2 18
- 19. Parallella Bring-up Day 3 19 Epiphany Coprocessor Read/Write Success
- 20. Parallella – What’s Next? 20 Ship 6,300 Boards ASAP Start the Parallella Academic Program Start working on Parallella-1024 Build a sustainable supply model