Parallel Processing for Embedded Systems

By -
image courtesy GreenArrays, Inc.
GreenArrays have announced the GA144, a low-energy processor with 144 cores. It's not cheap, as the minimum order is for 10 $20 chips, and the development board is $450 dollars, but it's of great interest to me; next year I will need some real processing power for a neural-network robot I am working on, and this looks as if it would be ideal.

Robotics enthusiasts will probably be familiar with the Parallax propeller, an inexpensive multi-cored processor that is desgined for hobbyist use. The propeller is an affordable introduction to parallel processing, but the GA144 offers a couple of orders of magnitude more processing power and is very energy-efficient.

The chairman of GreenArrays is Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth. The GA144 supports arrayForth, a powerful language for parallel computing.

Comments

  1. yanli25 November 2011 at 01:11

    I have no knowledge in programming for embedded device but in comparison to Intel chip, GA need to route the message manually to activate several computers, how much overhead will this create?

    What are the performance result if this is use as an embedded server?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Romilly Cocking25 November 2011 at 06:56

    Performance depends on the application and the application software. For my Neural Network application, each processor will be performing similar (but not identical) operations on local data. I expect a 100x improvement in processing speed over a single processor.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac
Read more