Hi,
I'm doing a thesis around this board and in fact this paradigm. But unfortunately I haven't got my board yet so I'm very under pressure (I pledged for a 64 core board). I’ve already extended once and the new deadline is April. I was wondering if somebody had a few minutes and wanted to try out their new board could they check something (I think it would be interesting for the community also).
I have an Intel Core i7 2GHz (turbo boosting to 2.6GHz) and I want to see where the Epiphany Chip could potentially outperform the i7. Obviously the i7 has much faster clock speed, much bigger caches, Turbo Boost, hyperthreading etc, but there are so many cores on the Epiphany that if it scales linearly (as shodruk's mandelbrot demo shows) then at what point and for what type of programs is it better to have an Epiphany chip rather than an i7? Or is it ever? Perhaps the cost would be restrictive.
As one of the demos is a matrix multiplication (the one that they have shown a lot), I’ve run a matrix multiplication OpenMP program (http://www.arc.vt.edu/resources/softwar ... mp_mmult.c) on my system. I used matrices of 2048 x 2048 to give a longer runtime to differentiate reuslts.
Here are the matrix multiplication times:
1 Core - 98 seconds
2 Cores - 55 seconds
4 Cores - 41 seconds
8 Cores - 32 seconds
I’ve a lot more tests I want to do when I get the board, but it would be great if somebody with a 16 core board could try this out for me (adjust the parameters to use 2048 x 2048 matrices). It would be even better if somebody had a 64 core board as we could see how it scales as it goes significantly higher. Ideally you would try it at intervals of powers of 2.
Depending on the results of this test I’ll work towards something for when I get my board. Perhaps theres no advantage on a load like this but a big advantage if you’re running enough threads that are doing DIFFERENT things. But I’ll leave that for later.
If anybody could run this I’d really appreciate it.
Thanks,
Eoghan.