FPGA Central

Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become a
parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS, can
they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?

--
Mvh / Best regards,
Jack, Copenhagen

The email address is for real.

Jack L. wrote:
> Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
> wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become a
> parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS, can
> they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?
>
> --
> Mvh / Best regards,
> Jack, Copenhagen
>
> The email address is for real.
>
>
>
In theory yes. And in theory for N processors all roped together you'll
get N times more performance. In fact you'll always get performance
less than N times, and sometimes less than a single processor alone (I
took a multiprocessor class a long time ago, the project was to build an
app and time it on one processor, then port it to multiple processors
and time it. The record speedup was 0.99*N on a hand-built machine with
two processors, the record slowdown was from 15 minutes on one processor
to over 24 hours on four on a Vax cluster).

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Jack wrote:

> Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
> wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become a
> parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS, can
> they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?

If you have some specific task in mind which you want to accomplish,
and have a good idea on how to connect the ez-kits to process this
task, then it might be worth it (an example might be a five channel
audio processing system, where you have one ez-kit for each channel).
In that case, it might even be cheaper than buying a high-end
processor with equivalent number crunching power.

For a general processing setup, you need more ports than are available
to connect the processors in a topology allowing serial as well as
parallel processing (don't forget some kind of shared memory
architecture). Furthermore, writing an operating system that allows
you to harness the power of parallel processors is not at all simple.
If you just want number crunching power, go for a Blackfin or
TigerSharc ez-kit, or just use a pc equipped with some monsterous 4GHz
processor, a C++ compiler and a sound card.

And if that isn't enough yet, you might want to start thinking about a
real parallel DSP hardware (not just a stack of ez-kits).

Regards,
Andor

[email protected] (Andor) wrote in message news:<[email protected] om>...
> Jack wrote:
>
> > Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
> > wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become a
> > parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS, can
> > they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?
>
> If you have some specific task in mind which you want to accomplish,
> and have a good idea on how to connect the ez-kits to process this
> task, then it might be worth it (an example might be a five channel
> audio processing system, where you have one ez-kit for each channel).
> In that case, it might even be cheaper than buying a high-end
> processor with equivalent number crunching power.
>
> For a general processing setup, you need more ports than are available
> to connect the processors in a topology allowing serial as well as
> parallel processing (don't forget some kind of shared memory
> architecture). Furthermore, writing an operating system that allows
> you to harness the power of parallel processors is not at all simple.
> If you just want number crunching power, go for a Blackfin or
> TigerSharc ez-kit, or just use a pc equipped with some monsterous 4GHz
> processor, a C++ compiler and a sound card.
>
> And if that isn't enough yet, you might want to start thinking about a
> real parallel DSP hardware (not just a stack of ez-kits).
>
> Regards,
> Andor

Hi, all.

Andor: from what I could infer from the original post, the idea, more
than getting a powerful processing platform is to give some nice usage
to a lot of EzKits. Maybe I'm wrong.

I can think of a multichannel audio or voice processing system for
giving "some nice usage to a lot of EzKits". For control I'd suggest
having one kit as master, the others as co-processors, controlled via
IDMA or the TDM features of the SPORTs.

Just my 2 cents.

JaaC

On 2004-09-18, Jack L. <[email protected]> wrote:
> Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
> wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become a
> parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS, can
> they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?

how much are they going for?

it's probably wisest to design a syste using a /single/
kit, then use the others as spares as they die.

(not that they die often, but eventually)


> --
> Mvh / Best regards,
> Jack, Copenhagen
>
> The email address is for real.
>
>
>


--
different MP3 every day! http://gweep.net/~shifty/snackmaster
. . . . . . . . ... . . . . . .
"Maybe if you ever picked up a goddamn keyboard | Niente
and compiler, you'd know yourself." -Matthew 7:1 | [email protected]

You might try these guys, they are always looking for kits, especially at a
discount price.

http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fdsp10.html

PD




"Jaime Andres Aranguren Cardona" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected] om...
> [email protected] (Andor) wrote in message
news:<[email protected] om>...
> > Jack wrote:
> >
> > > Our school is selling these EZ-Kit Lites out for almost nothing. I'm
> > > wondering if it's possible to put two or more together so they become
a
> > > parallel distributed computing system, as in, since they've 20 MIPS,
can
> > > they become 20 MIPS x [number of 2181 together]?
> >
> > If you have some specific task in mind which you want to accomplish,
> > and have a good idea on how to connect the ez-kits to process this
> > task, then it might be worth it (an example might be a five channel
> > audio processing system, where you have one ez-kit for each channel).
> > In that case, it might even be cheaper than buying a high-end
> > processor with equivalent number crunching power.
> >
> > For a general processing setup, you need more ports than are available
> > to connect the processors in a topology allowing serial as well as
> > parallel processing (don't forget some kind of shared memory
> > architecture). Furthermore, writing an operating system that allows
> > you to harness the power of parallel processors is not at all simple.
> > If you just want number crunching power, go for a Blackfin or
> > TigerSharc ez-kit, or just use a pc equipped with some monsterous 4GHz
> > processor, a C++ compiler and a sound card.
> >
> > And if that isn't enough yet, you might want to start thinking about a
> > real parallel DSP hardware (not just a stack of ez-kits).
> >
> > Regards,
> > Andor
>
> Hi, all.
>
> Andor: from what I could infer from the original post, the idea, more
> than getting a powerful processing platform is to give some nice usage
> to a lot of EzKits. Maybe I'm wrong.
>
> I can think of a multichannel audio or voice processing system for
> giving "some nice usage to a lot of EzKits". For control I'd suggest
> having one kit as master, the others as co-processors, controlled via
> IDMA or the TDM features of the SPORTs.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
> JaaC