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

Alexandre Torres Porres porres at gmail.com
Sun Sep 16 20:32:43 CEST 2012


Clearly there are cheaper computers other than apple, so I'm using it for
comparison to give the raspberry pi more chance to stand out in power.

But yeah, I made a bad comparison. First, you can actually have an apple
macbook pro 2.7Ghz i7 for 2.5k, I was picking a top configuration model to
compare to the price of this super-computer made of Pis, but the processing
power would be the same, and it is a notebook and not a tower. So I guess
the best way to compare the cost of this raspberry super computer to an
apple cost like machine is the Mac Pro, which is a tower, and for around 4k
you'd get two 6-core 2.4Ghz intel Xeon. And then 16GB of ram and 1TB HD,
juts like the pi Super Computer. Now, these are actually old machines that
haven't been properly updated, by the way.

Anyway, Hey, I didn't know anything about this Xeon Phi, it sound awesome.
But I figure it was designed for supercomputing tasks, which I also know
nothing about, and now I'm also very curious to know what kind of computer
music process you can have with this kind of thing.

But my doubt remains, would the raspberry supercomputer be more powerful
than this Mac Pro?

And if you say you can have a Xeon Phi Super Computer for 4 grand. Well, it
seems it would be more powerful than 64 Pis together, right?

thanks
Alex


2012/9/16 Charles Henry <czhenry at gmail.com>

> 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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>
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