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On 24/10/12 12:53, Gordon Henderson wrote:
If you want a cool cluster try the http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone?ref=home_popularOn Wed, 24 Oct 2012, paul sutton wrote:On 24/10/12 12:17, Gordon Henderson wrote:----- Message Text ----- http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221Yay, this is excellent, i guess we will start seeing some real hard core stuff coming out now. Going back to that pi cluster they made a while back you said it would be better if they could access the video Graphics bit, i take it this announcement makes that possible. So in theory we could have a pretty cool cluster. Am I right here ?Sort of.The GPU/Videocore is still a black box with lots of knobs, buttons, switches and levers with a binary blob of code to boot into it, but what they've opened up is the manual for those knobs, buttons, switches and levers that let you access the functions inside it.So really not much different from plugging in any dedicated hardware into a PC - e.g. a SCSI RAID conroller card. You get the register descirptions and how they work in the hardware manual for that card so you can write a Linux device driver to control it, but you don't get the circuit diagram or any internal code that may run on any microcontrollers on that card.So if one of those buttons is "matrix multiply", or "fft", or some other general purpose mathamatical function then it might be usable as a mini "supercomputer" type of thing, however given that its name is "videocore", I somehow doubt it.It should allow people to write better/faster video drivers for it though.Gordon
I want one! Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq