Hi!

>Parallella uses an ARM 9 chip and the Raspberry Pi uses an ARM 7. Is ARM 
9
>just newer and backward compatible with ARM 7 , or is it a totally
>different instruction set?  The reason I ask is that the Raspberry Pi 
apps
>use armhf (depending upon the distro I think) so would those apps work or
>is a new version required?

The ARM nomenclature is a bit confusing. 

Actually Raspberry Pi uses an "ARM 11" (!) type core which belongs to the 
"ARMv6" architecture/instruction set.
Parallella uses ARM "Cortex-A9" cores, which belong to the  "ARMv7" 
architecture/instruction set

ARMv7 is backwards compatibel to ARMv6 . Before we at Einstein@Home made a 
dedicated ARMv7 Linux versions, users were happily running the RasPi ARMv6 
version  on their ARMv7 Linux boards.

David wrote:
>The question is whether represent it as an existing platform
>with a new type of coprocessor, or as a new platform.
>I suggest the latter.

I  suggest the former (coprocessor)
Reasons:
- Parallella is planned to come in several flavors with Epiphany chips 
having 16 cores (initial (current) version), 64 cores (maybe next year?), 
or even 1024 cores eventually. To me this will more naturally map to a 
scenario where the Epiphany is modelled as a coprocessor.

- Even more so in the future: Future versions might come with newer ARM 
cores as well (say eventually ARMv8 , the 64 bit instruction set). If you 
model the Epiphany as a coprocessor, you can deal with all the 
combinations of ARM-cores and Epiphany chips in an orthogonal way (CPU and 
coprocessor types separately), if you model it as a platform you have to 
map the matrix of possible combinations to one type I guess.

- The ARM on the Parallela is a dual-core, so in theory you can execute 
two BOINC tasks in parallel (BOINC will be running on the ARM cores, not 
the epiphany cores).  So you have to solve the same scheduling problem as 
with GPUs, where some tasks might need the full Epiphany chip (the default 
scenario I guess) but you can still run another task on the other ARM 
core, e.g. a task from a project that does not support the Ephiphany 
"coprocessor" if you model it that way. 


Cheer
HB
 

 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
Callinstrasse 38
D-30167 Hannover,  Germany
Tel.: +49-511-762-19466 (Room 037)



From:   Jon Sonntag <[email protected]>
To:     Stephen Maclagan <[email protected]>, 
Cc:     "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date:   03/14/2014 05:09 AM
Subject:        Re: [boinc_dev] Boinc on Parallella
Sent by:        "boinc_dev" <[email protected]>



Parallella uses an ARM 9 chip and the Raspberry Pi uses an ARM 7. Is ARM 9
just newer and backward compatible with ARM 7 , or is it a totally
different instruction set?  The reason I ask is that the Raspberry Pi apps
use armhf (depending upon the distro I think) so would those apps work or
is a new version required?

Jon Sonntag

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Stephen Maclagan <
[email protected]> wrote:

> The first Boinc user to get Boinc running on a Parallella has happened:
>
> http://forums.parallella.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1026
>
> Since the Boinc version that apt-get gives is only Boinc 7.2.7,
> i've asked Gianfranco Costamagna to see if he can get his following
> packages fixed so they'll build for armhf:
>
> https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/boinc
>
> https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/firefox
>
> Then at least Parallella Boinc users can get an up to date version,
> and any changesets can be pushed to them reasonably quickly.
> (Unless the Saucy Salamander Boinc 7.2.7 can be updated to 7.2.42)
>
> Claggy
>
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