As a part of the course on Computer Architecture, how can students be provided a flavor of multicore/manycore architecture through some real hands on experience (may be through programming/using some specific tool/using some pre-designed boards or arrangements etc.)?
Prasun, I am part of a kickstarter funding project for parallela - a $99 'home hpc' computer. I have yet to receive my machine, though RSN is what they keep telling me :-) :-( They also have a university project that might be of interest - http://www.adapteva.com/announcements/adapteva-introduces-parallella-university-program/
Please note that other than a funder of the original kickstart project, I have no financial interest in the company.
Thanks Jerry for your answer. This is indeed an interesting option to be explored and a good initiative. I appreciate that.
However, am also interested in if someone is experimenting with any other open source resources available in any form, may not be in very well integrated form.
Prasun - all the design details for the parallela project are available. verilog designs can be downloaded at https://github.com/parallella/parallella-hw
On the open source hardware side, you might look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_hardware_projects
Prasun - just announced from the Raspberry Pi consortium -
http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-compute-module-new-product/
Is the purpose to train students in designing the hardware, or rather to
understand the hardware to best use it? The latter is of course a
much larger group.
For the latter group, programming would be the way that they would interact
with this. One way would be to expose them to OpenMP in either
Fortran, C or C++.
OpenMP is directive based so it is a fairly simple extension to the language.
The big difference in multicore is that you can have shared variables accessed
simultaneously so you have race conditions in updating variables, and
you can have performance problems form false sharing. Both these
feed into the architecture.
At our Univ, the suggested computer for incoming freshman is an Intel I5
which is a quad core processor. Even an I3 would be dual core.
If you need more, you could get a computer with an Intel Knights Corner
card which has 60 cores on the card for about $1500 a card, though
you need to have this designed in so that you have sufficient power for
the card. This card runs OpenMP programs and even runs its
own OS, so you could even think of it as an attached computer.
James - I'm in complete agreement with you. My intent on identifying low cost options was so that the student would be able to experience parallel programming on something that they owned. I'm all in favor of OpenMP (using it on my AMD Phenom II x6) to help.
@Jerry: Thanks for the update on Parallela and Raspberry Pi Compute module. I think this Compute module can be a good choice for students to play with dual core platform.
@James: Thanks for such an informative answer. OpenMP is indeed a good option. Do you have any suggestion for the first option i.e. hardware designing?
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