Parallella Community

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/01/how- ... g-freenas/

There are options available from complete DIY to plug and play (see the Drobo link). USB 2.0 + GigE is all you need.

Hi!
I've been working in the software space for quite some time now, but started off as an electronic technician many more years ago...
I firmly believe there can't be (and there shouldn't be) a "one-size-fits-all" solution... instead, a "plug-and-play" one sounds more reasonable nowadays.
Please, don't include extra features to the base hardware (although I would benefit from SATA too), as long as there are alternatives to "tailor" the configuration to most of the folk's needs.
I am willing to go with NAS (thanks for the free-NAS link), or "cloud" my storage.
At the end of the day... aren't we all going to network this baby?

Cheers!
Alec

Hi All

could you use the ISERDES/OSERDES channels on the FPGA as a SATA port? I understand that this will require some external hardware and software support; Just a thought!

There maybe something here I'm missing (i'm no SATA expert!) but these two links below indicate its possible (even only at slower speeds)

(page 16) - Reference to SERDES in Zync Overview

- Using SATA directly on Virtex-5 FPGA

Unfortunately the high speed SERDES IO is not available on the Zynq device we chose for the Parallella board. High speed SERDES is available for the high end versions of of the Zynq, but at a $99 price per Parallella board there was no way we could have fit those into the budget.

Even if integrating the SATA ports on Parallella would increase the price a little, its ok. Fast, big and easily bootable storage is important for a PC. Storing the OS and all the processing data on SD card is very slow, even if using a class 10 or higher cards.

Hi,

I just discovered this thread, and as I'm working with Missing Link Electronics, who are actively supporting a SATA solution for ZYNQ chips, I guess, I can give some insides to the feasibility of SATA on ZYNQ.

First of all: as already stated by aolofsson doing SATA requires basically Gigabit Transceivers. The SelectI/Os of the ZYNQ 7010 and ZYNQ 7020 are not sufficient for a SATA solution.
If there were SAPIS compliant PHYs as a buyable part, that would be great, honestly, we haven't seen those for years now, unfortunately, but that way we could use the 7020.

There might come out a low cost ZYNQ with transceivers, but with the current chips, there would be the need of a ZYNQ 7030 or above or external SAPIS Phy as a chip.

SAPIS PHY example: http://taracom.net/chip.pl?to=sata

Regards,
Lorenz

While SATA sounds nice, how much storage does one actually need on this kind of platform? I'd rather see a PCI-Express based SSD-grade chip. Most people likely won't need more than 16-64GB max for whatever applications they're going to use their Parallella, and the PCI-E based storage would certainly keep storage from being a bottleneck. And considering most OS's support TRIM these days, it would ensure longevity of the storage medium.

I'd also like to see an upgrade of the NIC, or at least availability of a 10GBE copper RJ-45. If anyone plans to cluster a number of these to do some serious OpenCL based number crunching, the added bandwidth would be pretty awesome...

cubieboard is a pretty poor choice for a NAS...it only has a 10/100 NIC, meaning you'll only ever get a maximum of 12.5 MB/s out of it.

You and I have a very different definition of sane...my definition involves as little custom work as possible..ie..as many off-the-shelf components as possible. I like to find out just how far I can push existing products. In the case of clustering a handful of parallella's, sure it might be cheaper up front to build a basic machine with a Titan GPU, but it you build a parallella cluster with the same computing power (assuming the 1GBE NIC isn't a bottleneck), you'll save money in the long run on power requirements. With the huge push these days on green computing, such a setup would be pretty nice.

I think that active processing will get pushed down closer to the storage. If you were to have multiple Cubieboards each serving blocks to a more capable device - maybe the end users device you could do a pretty good RAID set-up.

For RAID5 setup the sequential read or writes speed would be close to the aggregated network bandwidth. Ditto for random reads.

If you were to match your stripe width to the block size you could avoid most of the RAID5 readback before write overhead. (e.g. use five disks, with a 1k stripe size (close to ethernet frame) and aggregate them into a 4kB/sector RAID array.

Read/write speed of 50MB/s (saturate your wireless), about 500 IOPS for random reads, and about 4GB of disk cache at the media.