getting started

[joearms]

Hello,

I'm a total newby (as regards the parallella) ... so I thought I'd start with a few questions

I've just got a 64 core board up and running.

Now what?

I want to understand in detail what I can do with this little beauty - can we compile Erlang to it
despite the small memory. Can we write a BIF accelerator and run erlang in the arm processor?

What I want to do make the "simplest possible C" program that does something.
say set x=10 double it and stop.

I want to load the code into one core - then from another core read the code and
data memory and disassemble everything.

What do I need to download?

Are there any blogs etc that go through the really simple stuff.

/Joe Armstrong

[9600]

Hi Joe,

Welcome and it's great to hear that you are up and running your 64-core board!

For some simple and more advanced example programs see:

https://github.com/adapteva/epiphany-examples

https://github.com/parallella/parallella-examples

As regards running Erlang, you might find these two posts from Omer Kilic useful:

http://www.parallella.org/2013/05/25/ex ... a-prelude/

http://www.parallella.org/2013/09/10/ex ... th-pixels/

Very much looking forward to hearing about Erlang developments on Parallella

Cheers,

Andrew

[shodruk]

[ZenoArrow]

Hi Joe,

Think this guide is the best one for getting started...
http://www.erlang-embedded.com/2013/09/ ... lang-mini/

Permission to fangirl for a second... OMG it's Joe Armstrong! Thank you for letting me get that out of my system!

ZenoArrow

[shr]

Yes, it's good to see Joe involved with this. Parallella has much promise and and Erlang looks like the best candidate to bring that promise to fruition, but I'm sure there's considerable work to make that happen.

[ZenoArrow]

[greytery]

Thanks for that great good link to Erlang-mini.

Got very excited for a short while there, until I saw that it was '-mini' and not '-micro'. So no Erlang on the Epiphany.
But, the ARM version for Parallella - and Pi - looks well worth a visit. The package size of 20MB sounds doable.
The key to the success of Erlang on Parallella will be getting some performant library routines (C/C++/ASM) to interface Erlang-mini to Epiphany cores.
At first glance (last year) it looked like porting the libs in the e-sdk manual wouldn't be a big stretch (for someone who knows what they're doing).

(1+ ) I can also recommend that Erlang intro. It's far better written than the grammar of the title would suggest.
The paperback version weighs (and costs) a ton, but you can read the same text on-line.

Cheers

[ZenoArrow]

Hey teri, thanks. It sounds to me like you've had some experience with Erlang in the past, do you have any other Erlang learning resources or articles you could recommend? Personally I'd be most interested in learning the best methods to debug Erlang, but any constructive advice would be most welcome.

[greytery]

Hi ZenoArrow,

I talk a bigger talk than I ought to.
I came to Erlang as a result of looking under the hood of . There were some bits of code that I thought looked very elegant, almost like poetry.
I suppose I fell in love.

Wings 3D does not really stretch the Erlang language or architecture; for example, it runs in a single Erlang VM on one PC. It was originally written in Erlang - it seems - as a part-time programming exercise by one of the early developers. As a starter, however, just downloading and deconstructing the code gives many good examples of how the language works.

An important point though, is that when low-level performance stuff like graphics is needed, Wings 3D calls up C libraries (like any other interpreted language). That is the same thing that will need to be done between, say, Erlang mini and the Epiphany. Even with the 64 * 128kb core Epiphany coming in 2015(?), there's no room on the chip for the Erlang base.

Cheers,