http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone?ref=live
Im wondering how useful this may be for Terragen 2? I have been thinking about something like this for quite some time, but I don't know enough about the software side of this whole thing to know if rendering on this parrallel "farm" of CPU's is a possibility? Because Im seriously thinking of investing in this one.
any chance anyone knows? It is at least interesting to read. :)
Short answer: No, it's not appropriate for Terragen 2 in its (TG2's) current form.
We'd have to change probably quite a lot of code to make it work at all, since it's not a standard x86 platform, and even if we did the performance probably wouldn't be great since the architecture relies on such massive parallelism. TG scales reasonably well with current average core counts like 4-8, even up to as much as 12-24, but past that point efficiency is not very good. Fortunately systems with more than 24 real cores (not hyperthreading threads/cores, physical cores) are pretty rare and very expensive. We do continue to improve multithreading over time, and I think we'll keep pace with the industry's slow-but-steady rise in core count, but a sudden jump to 64, much less 100s or 1000s of threads would not work with the current architecture.
Save your money and get a Core i7 and overclock it instead. For $5-700 you can get a barebones system that will probably reach ~4Ghz with 4 cores/8 threads and that will just tear through TG renders. :D
- Oshyan
You should look at the list of recent parallel processor efforts on their website:
http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/the-siren-song-of-parallel-computing/
I am developing a parallel programming language (editor, parser, code generator) and decided to investigate the list on this web page for the potential of a massively parallel target platform. The great majority of these efforts are now defunct. I wouldn't advise PS to seriously put any resources into such a high risk effort only to have the hardware evaporate. The only parallel hardware that is even worth PS's time to ponder are the GPUs that we already have in our PCs. These, though, are not very general purpose and are quite hard-wired for graphic support.