Parallella, Raspberry Pi, FPGA & All That Stuff

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Addendum : an orthogonal

Addendum : an orthogonal aspect is to weigh in with the FPGA, not a trivial asset here. This could breezily shuffle large vector operands no sweat. You would not need to do any floating arithmetic on it at all, thus suffer neither a greedy-for-real-estate nor crippled soft core.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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Hi So finally my

Hi

So finally my Parallella board has arrived. I got a little fan for cooling, cconnected everything (I had bought the accessory pack with 15W PSU, cables and SD card so I thought I was ready to go...) but nothing: the thing failed to boot.

A little browsing in the Parallella forum revealed I'm not alone: a lot of people complain about the accessory kit's PSU not working, some users went as far as disassembling the PSU where they found bulged capacitors!

I later got it to boot with a rather feeble 5V, 2A USB charger type of PSU but I'll get some quality >= 15W PSU for heavy loads (stress test using E@H, needless to say)

HBE

Claggy
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I've got Boinc 7.2.47

I've got Boinc 7.2.47 compiled on my Parallella's, and attached to both the Einstein projects, and both the Seti projects, with the ABOpen case and fan they are running between 55 and 60 degrees C, BRP Wu's will probably take around 30 to 35 hours.

Claggy

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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RE: I've got Boinc 7.2.47

Quote:

I've got Boinc 7.2.47 compiled on my Parallella's, and attached to both the Einstein projects, and both the Seti projects, with the ABOpen case and fan they are running between 55 and 60 degrees C, BRP Wu's will probably take around 30 to 35 hours.

Claggy

Hi!

Quite a bit faster, my first BRP unit validated (another which was run in parallel is waiting for validation) after ca 24 h:

http://einsteinathome.org/host/11381212/tasks

I'm now using the Parallella exclusively over VNC as the USB port on this thingy is just too flaky and might even be toast now on my board. Looks like many users share this problem.

I installed a rather strong little 5V fan (claims to do 13 cubic meters per hour @ 6200 RPM) that keeps the temperature of the SoC at ca 50 deg Celsius under full BOINC load. Of course I tried disconnecting the fan to see what happens...within a few minutes the temp reached 70 deg C (with just the heatsink installed) and I quickly reactivated the fan.

HB

Claggy
Claggy
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Mine (one here, one on

Mine (one here, one on Albert) have completed in around 25 hours, (2nd Parallella hasn't quite finished it's first tasks yet),
CPU is less than yours, but elapsed time is greater, been running xtemp on both Parallellas, so that is probably eating up time.

I have a Logitech K750 and a M235 mouse and a pre-paired unifying dongle, once i've booted the Parallella (and logged in) with the dongle connected, i switch the dongle over and then boot the other Parallella and login,
i then move the dongle between them and my Ubuntu 12.04 T8100 Laptop (i broke a pin for the LCD screen, while the screen still works, it causes screen corruption and a reboot, but works fine if i have a Monitor connected via HDMI,
tend to have the desktop extended onto that, and the laptop closed, hence the need for an external keyboard),
will try VNC too.

Claggy

MarkJ
MarkJ
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I have one up and running.

I have one up and running. Pics on my blog. Running headless. I control it via BOINCtasks and an ssh session.

I can see why Claggy compiled BOINC as the repo has 7.2.7. Need to order some more 60mm fans so I can get the other one going.

It's looking like its first BRP4 will come in around 18 hours, in contrast the Pi's take around 31 hours (with medium overclock). It's only running 1 at the moment, will try two at a time when I have it properly set up.

Claggy
Claggy
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RE: I can see why Claggy

Quote:
I can see why Claggy compiled BOINC as the repo has 7.2.7.


Other Options are to upgrade the OS to Trusty Tahr to get 7.2.42:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/boinc

Or use a different PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/boinc

or

https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/locutusofborg-ppa

Claggy

MarkJ
MarkJ
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Got it running Ubuntu 14.04

Got it running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS now along with BOINC 7.2.42.

It seems the clock doesn't get set for a few seconds after BOINC starts so it show the date as the 01-01-1970 and then just after it tries the benchmarks the time gets set and benchmark fails. Not a big deal, probably just need it to get the time earlier in the boot sequence or delay BOINC start up. Also I notice BOINC is saying it doesn't has 0 virtual memory but top shows it as having virtual.

I have tried putting a but that just tells BOINC to not start the tasks for a few seconds after it gets going, it doesn't help the benchmarks.

1			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Starting BOINC client version 7.2.42 for arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf	
2			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task	
3			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Libraries: libcurl/7.35.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1f zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.28 librtmp/2.3	
4			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client	
5			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	No usable GPUs found	
6			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Host name: para1	
7			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Processor: 2 ARM 	
8			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Processor features: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpd32	
9			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	OS: Linux: 3.12.0-g0bc9c3a-dirty	
10			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Memory: 969.19 MB physical, 0 bytes virtual	
11			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Disk: 6.92 GB total, 3.42 GB free	
12			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Local time is UTC +10 hours	
...
29			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Running CPU benchmarks	
30			01-01-1970 11:00 AM	Suspending computation - CPU benchmarks in progress	
31			21-05-2014 01:58 AM	[error] CPU benchmarks timed out, using default values	


Claggy
Claggy
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You'll want the Fake Hardware

You'll want the Fake Hardware Clock just like on the Pi:

No more back to 1970

Quote:

Bored to back to 1970? :lol:
Install fake-hwclock.

sudo apt-get install fake-hwclock

Claggy

ExtraTerrestrial Apes
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Just to clarify, you guys are

Just to clarify, you guys are crunching on the ARM core, right? There's no app yet to actually use the Parallela co-processor.. or did I miss this completely?

MrS

Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

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