[PD] Super computer made of legos and Raspberry Pi computers

[Charles Henry]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres
<porres at gmail.com> wrote:
> now my question is;
>
> spending 4k to build a Pi supercomputer can give you more power and
> possibilities than with a top of the line MAC for example (which will cost
> just as much, and be a quad core 2.7 intel i7, 1.6GHz bus, 16GB Ram).

I think what you'll want to spend 4k on is a Xeon Phi co-processor for
a desktop instead.  It has 50 cores and a 512-bit instruction word
length on each core.

> I'm guessing that CPU wize it would be more powerful indeed; even thought
> it's a modest one, that's 64 cores against 4...
>
> what I'm not familiar to is how supercomputing works and optimizes the work
> by splitting it into all CPU units. Maybe it does work like getting hard
> drives into RAID 0 mode, right? Where the speed of file transfer does double
> up.

You have to write software with MPI (for clustering) or OpenMP
(massively multi-threaded) to take advantage of those extra cores.
You always lose some efficiency when using multiple cores, but you may
speedup the program.  The highest possible speedup is achieved when
all processes are independent.


>
> cheers
> Alex
>
> 2012/9/16 i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com>
>>
>> yeah, separating individual instruments / voices from a mix does seem like
>> a 'just over the horizon' application.  I'd love to be able to have a stereo
>> microphone in the room i'm in now, and separate the sound of the rain, the
>> wind, the TV in the background, my typing at this keyboard....
>>
>
>
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