Parallella Community

I was wondering about RAM.
I am planning to build out a web server on this board, and apache can be very piggy about ram. I am not as concerned with the number of processors since the epiphany-16 will probably handle the stress. It looks like RAM is the next bottleneck. Am I just wrong? Should I wait patiently for my board to arrive?

Wolf

You might have a wrong idea of what the board is designed for / capable of.

The Parallella isn't a 16 or 64 core wide SMP system - it's a two core ARM system with something akin to a 16 or 64 floating point co-processors. Each of these co-processors are a bit like a GPU shader, able to run a small program. This makes your question a bit like saying "I've put a high end GPU into my PC, will it make my web server super fast, or will I have a RAM bottleneck?"

So the answer is "No" - this board will serve pages like any other ARM board, that is unless you are using the Epiphany to accelerate the processing of data that you will be serving.

Thanks, hamster,

I may have been a bit confused.

wolf

now that this technology is ages old, anyone has some news on that, in relation to parallella? since parallella needs a redesign anyway, could this technology be used there? or in the new redesigned epiphany4 chip?

as for an epiphany5, I was thinking, what about a 3d-mesh network, with north,south,east,west, and up and down? maybe a pin-out allowing for 6 elink connections? 12GB/s, 6 in and 6 out, that sounds quite interesting. well, maybe not for 64 cores, but 4096 cores based on a 16x16x16 grid sounds much more managable than a 64x64 network. maybe even give fpga access to 3 elink-connections instead of 1...

of course my ideas wont work: heat-management in 3d is much more complicated. and there simply is not enough space for 150% pins (so I guess epiphany and fpga need to talk spi to eachother). but at least I can dream.