[mdlug] Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter

[Jonathan Billings]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 09:12:56AM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> A supercomputer is only useful for problems that can be decomposed in
> certain ways [or is worth figuring out how to decompose].  Otherwise an
> old-fashioned just-faster-computer is better.

Well, most people's multi-core CPUs sit idle 99% of the time, unless
they're running an app that is specifically made to use multiple
threads (maybe a game, or specialized software like Matlab).  I really
doubt the average user would even know how to use a HPC system.

Back before the company went under, I worked on setting up a HPC
system in a desktop form-factor made by SiCortex.  It used a box
filled with nodes that had a system on a chip running a 6-core
MIPS64.  It was pretty neat, very low power and not half bad for a
72-core cluster.  But you couldn't just log into the system and use it
like it was a 72-core desktop system, it was very much an HPC cluster
with a 2GB/s interconnect.  I expect that the aformentioned RasPi
cluster would be the same, where the interconnect is limited by the
USB bus.  Fine for HPC jobs that don't require a fast interconnect,
but not so useful for something that, say, relied on a distributed
memory system.

Of course, you could use this mini-HPC-cluster for nice things like
Folding at home or less-than-nice things like generating rainbow tables.  

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>