Raspberry Pi server clusters

A topic i found from Stackoverflow if it could help.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7420970/raspberry-pi-cluster-neuron-networks-and-brain-simulation

A topic i found from Stackoverflow if it could help.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7420970/raspberry-pi-cluster-neuron-networks-and-brain-simulation

Very interesting answers provided at that link, thanks freads, especially the one about the SpiNNaker architecture which linked to articles at EEtimes and ZDnet:

- http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4217840/Million-ARM-cores-brain-simulator

- http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2011/07/08/million-core-arm-machine-aims-to-simulate-brain-40093356/

From those links, it seems that the basic unit in SpiNNaker is a die with 18 ARM968 cores and 55 x 32-kbyte SRAM blocks, plus an additional 1 Gbit DDR SDRAM die, and the two are then packaged together in a 300-BGA.

No doubt it's for research only, but sure would be nice if they went on to sell them.

By coincidence, I did my multiprocessor research in Manchester too.  Those were very interesting days.

Morgaine.

More links about SpiNNaker:

• A - http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/
• B - http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/spin_fascicle.php
• C - http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/Projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/index3.php
• D - ftp://ftp.cs.man.ac.uk/pub/amulet/papers/LAP_IEEEDandT_07.pdf
• E - http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/270985/
• F - http://www.artificialbrains.com/spinnaker
• G - http://neuromorphs.net/nm/wiki/ng11/results/Spinnaker

Link C details the PCBs they've been creating for their SpiNNaker BGA devices.  It's interesting that the "Spin3" board is unrelated to the million-core brain simulator but targets robots instead.

The latest "Spin4" board adopts a very interesting design strategy for I/O.  Quoting the article:

• "Rather than use lots of ribbon cables to connect boards together, inter-board links are concentrated in FPGAs and converted to serial format.  The high-speed serial interfaces on the FPGAs drive standard SATA hardware at 3 Gbps and SATA cables are used for board-to-board connections."

Great reuse of commodity standards, must save them a ton of money versus proprietary HPC interconnects.

Morgaine.

Thanks for the University of Manchester links Morgaine. I am yet to study ARM processors and FPGAs. I'm still an Undergrad in Electronics and Communications unfortunately and i had plans to do projects based on FPGA, like i wanted to make an FPGA based High Frequency Trading platform for market analysis and all that stuff and then i restricted myself because FPGA is costly and i'm not having much of a knowledge to implement such systems. I hope i do that in my Masters degree which i'm planning to do on Computational Science and Engineering. ARM is the only way i think i will have to implement a HPC platform for analysis or atleast the platform itself can be my final year project running some basic parallel codes like image processing ones.

Kishore

In case you didn't see it earlier, freads, we had a thread running here about Raspberry Pi + FPGAs:

    http://www.element14.com/community/thread/17692?tstart=30

I sure hope a little community arises in time around combining an FPGA with Rpi, preferably something as open as possible in both hardware and software so that EE students can get their hands dirty at all levels rather than just being consumers of proprietary "and magic happens here" FPGA design software.

Morgaine.

Yup...i'm really excited to see this post. Thank you so much Morgaine..i'm really happy. You should check out this person's website http://www.shakthimaan.com/downloads.html he is an open source guy maybe he could help. I still have to ask him about the project i will be doing. But i need to do my ground work, like study ARM processors and write code in MPI etc etc. I'm too bad at coding, i've get my hands dirty on that first during my summer holidays. I have my exams coming up next week and after that things need to take shape quickly if i want to do something useful.

Kishore