I would use it to go to hackaday and add the following comment to every new hack…

1st!

Why hubs instead of switches?

manycore isnt simply just a multicore cpu. you actually have to have code that utilizes the several cores like gridgain or sun gridengine with jobs made for them. it only outpaces a laptop with specifically coded jobs to share the work; its not just a regular 10 core computer tranparently

R is largely cpu-bound and badly vectorizable, so it makes sense that using 8 cores instead of 2 speeds up the process, even though the clock speed will be half that of the laptop’s, or even worse.

This doesnt actaully compare to having a faster laptop, does it? Like Aero said: “Crysis?”

Observe that the CPU utilization is not pegged when he runs the benchmark on the laptop. I suspect that the improvement results from the random access capabilities of all those flash memory cards.

Also, why all the separate power supplies? I’m up to my ears in 5V logic supplies. Would it be that hard to rig an ATX supply to power the BeagleBoards instead of that rats’ nest of wall warts and outlet strips?

This thing is like a troll cluster. No way could he have made it look that terrible and unorganized unless it was on purpose.

I can’t say this “benchmark” really blows me away either, this thing only finishes the task around 10 seconds faster than his dual-core laptop. Comparing a dual-core laptop with a cluster is hardly a fair fight.

I agree with kristian as well. Why does he appear to actively avoid showing the screen of the power meter during the test? Maybe I am just being overly suspicious, but the way the camera moves makes it seem like he intentionally never points towards the screen, and moves back to the laptop as quickly as possible.

What I would do with this?

Well, for starters, I’d get the DSP’s in alignment over some sort of sync layer .. there’s a *lot* of computing power in those cores that isn’t normally utilized for much more than video decoding, so some sort of ‘math library’ for the DSP’s would be my first order. Perhaps a multi-voice per-BB synthesizer would be in order, or at least a multitimbral sampler with accelerated filters or so ..

Then I’d work on the GUI front-end. Those little SGX’s are deadly in the right context. Dunno how I’d mux ‘em, though ..

Aero, I know ;) Sorry if you took my reply the wrong way.

me wantee, but not havee $2000 to spare. (wish i did though)

You guys have no imagination.

I would steal GSM calls from foreign dignitaries and use it to hook them up with prostitutes of the opposite gender from whatever they actually ordered.

proof of concept doesn’t require mounting, good job

I’d think that while it probably consumes a bit more power, a miniITX-based quad or hex core machine would probably at the worst be comparable to this at a significantly lower cost and complexity. I can’t imagine that six multi-GHz, more advanced cores wouldn’t be able to compete with 10 much slower ARM cores. Shouldn’t be hard to cram it into a suitcase that size either, though cooling might be a bit more difficult.

Also I find it amusing that he points out he’s making the whole thing open source. It already is open source, guy, all you’ve done, as far as I can tell, is strap it together. Can’t copyright an idea, remember…

I have to post some credit for Mitch Williams and Ron Minnich, who came up with this sort of thing years ago: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177/

Plus, they solved the power and wiring problems nicely.

Compliments!!! Especially for the order inside the suitcase.

@tim: You could make a systolic array with your atmegas and use it for solving vector math. It probably wouldn’t be terribly useful, but I bet it would earn you top marks as a CS project.

I really hope that laptop doesn’t cost $4500.

Impressive machines, but I don’t see what they are comparing.

The laptop is running the code and full gui, which eats up a lot more resources than a small kernel.

This sort of test is also biased towards cluster computing.

None the less, its amazing to see that you can use beagle boards in a cluster fashion, hope to see more!

FAWN, anyone? http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/

Gen. 1: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/images/FAWN_cluster1.JPG

Gen. 2:http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/images/FAWN_cluster2.JPG

Gen. 3: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/images/FAWN_3G.JPG

Gen. 4: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/images/FAWN_4.JPG

You can buy a $1000 laptop with a quad-core processor with hyperthreadding (so 8 cores to linux) and 6GB of memory that will crunch that data in a much smaller time – and it’s easy on power too.