post intresting parts thread
 

well this thread you post intresting or sweet parts at good prices that you find to kick it off

[url]http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-117-025&depa=1[/url]

bumpdadabump come on post darn u...

A pretty interesting part for you moo
 

I wouldn't want you to get bored waiting, moo so check this out:

[URL]http://www.lenslet.com/products.asp[/URL]

Read about the enlight256 optical processor

This can do dsp operations including FFT extremely fast by a parallel processing powered super-processor based on light rather than electrical signals. And did I mention, it's FAST!

GIMPS/Primenet use FFT to perform the big maths in the LL testing.

Actually it is capable of 8000 giga multiply/accumulate operations per second.
(Yes, think 8000 GHz equivalent machine). Multiply/accumulate is fundamental to FFT and that's what prime95 spends most of its time doing.

They will sell the "spatial light modulator" parts separately if you want to build your own (heh you do have that PhD in photonics don't you), but the development board (enlight256) will set you back a mere $17000 (from what I remember).

Now, we only need George to get on with porting the prime95 sources to this hardware (aka totally rewriting) and we could top the primenet contributors list in no time at all.

(I say this partly as a joke as you need to consider the resolution of these calculations, rounding and other errors etc but nontheless, it's a nice piece of kit)

Here's some quote....

"Lenslet's innovative EnLight256™ is the world's first commercially available vector DSP with an embedded optical core. The EnLight is a fixed-point processor comprised of three elements: a Vector Matrix Multiplier (VMM) capable of performing vector-matrix operations at a rate of up to 8000 Giga MAC operations per second; a Vector Processor Unit (VPU) capable of performing 128 Giga operations per second and an industry standard DSP (TI TMS320C64xx) for control and scalar processing (SPU). The EnLight256™ could be used either as a system-embedded accelerator or a standalone processor for computational intensive types of applications. "

Heh, I think what we need is a "system-embedded accelerator" for GIMPS. LOL.

Unfortunately I don't have $17000 spare (or maybe it was £17000 GBP). It's quite a big board (should just fit in a pc case) but they are trying to shrink all the technology stuff onto smaller size, maybe even a single chip. Check out the video on their website to see a picture in the lab, or lasers, and stuff.

But I am connected with a Photonics Research Cluster at a university in the UK next door to us.

Maybe they can be persuaded to get one in so that we can do research into running large FFT on the board. We might need to keep the board a long time in order to "test" our algorithms and their stability. Did I say stability? I heard prime95 was good for that! Hey maybe we could test a few million exponents to make sure our FFT algorithm was implemented properly ;-)

Now, if we accidentally found a prime during this testing, well, I'm sure someone would be kind enough to run the double check for us :-)

Lenslet's application engineers have implemented FFT on this and would help workout if our application was possible and to some extent help. They have already put it to such boring tasks as encryption, radar and mobile phone analysis, media encoding, but really they ought to try something genuinely interesting like mathematics of primes. I had thought seriously of writing a research proposal to implementing LL testing on this kit which would help the company to show off what it's hardware can do (Blue Gene supercomputer give up now) and advance the field of mathematics. Imagine the headline: working as part of a team of 50000 pcs worldwide, the largest known mersenne prime was found by an optical processor in England, after searching for 0.00001 days :-) Please don't steal my project idea yourself without asking though.

By the way, this may not be able to reduce your total exponent test time to 1/8000th of a second (as LL test is sequential not parallel), but maybe could test 8000 exponents in the time it currently takes to do one, if pipelined the stages. Actually thinking about it although LL test can't be parallelised, the FFT multiply implementation can be.

And before you ask, no, this processor doesn't support SSE2 :-)

Nontheless, pretty cool eh?

yaa thats neat light proc trys to cram it into 478 socket.... fails misreibily.... :help: :help:

Optical processing....
 

Hehe,

ROFL, Maybe you need socket 939 for that ;-)

Actually they want to shrink this board down to similar size to a conventional processor/fan type size and are seriously working on it. Careful you don't bend any pins if trying to force it into a conventional socket :-)

If you want to get into optical acceleration now, you can add some bright led fans, maybe even take apart one of those fiber optic decorations and route the light around with it. Put a few laser pointers in your case, and several mirrors, a prism, cold cathode, a fresnel lens, a flashlight torch, maybe a hologram out of a breakfast cereal packet etc and you will have plenty of optical co-processing. I have one of those RGB colour scrolling led based moodcubes in which 9 segments of square translucent acrylic plastic, modified a bit.

Oh, and (a serious recommendation) stick in a backlit Matrix Orbital MX2 lcd display device (I got mine from [url]www.maplin.co.uk[/url] for about £100 GBP, but they are well respected company and have their own website for whole range. It can be driven from windows or linux and with a little effort (pretty easy protocol to program) display progress on the lcd. (code exists on this forum for reading the current status of the test, you just need to send the percentage to the MX2 over the USB-based serial link.

Once you've installed all these items, please could you let me know how much this increases your exponent throughput by.

It certainly *looks* faster :-)

PS. There is another cool optical component which I would tell you about but I might want to use the idea commercially in a product add-on for the pc so really I should keep that a secret, sorry.

intresting this thread has gone from post intresting parts to random lights for cases.... hmm well your at it a mini torch could help and a reverese heat pump to pump heat into the case in turn raiseing cpu temp makeing you think you are doing more work then u really are.....

An 8THz PC? Now THAT would be awesome!

... to random lights for cases
 

Moo:

".... to random lights for cases"

I was being tongue in cheek about putting all that junk in your case, and knew perfectly well it would not give you any accelleration whatsoever, but it would look the part. (as in "go faster stripes" on a car.) It was my "poor man's solution" for those who can't afford the £17K optical DSP solution but can dream.

As for my lights being random, they certainly are not. The moodcube was originally randomly scrolling through colours RGB and intermediate mixed shades using pulse width modulation and an embedded chip on each RGB triplet. As I stated I modified it so that the lights have a sequence that I determine, the shade of colour I wish, and speed of change I determine. They are therefore not now merely casemodders decorational enhancements, but can be a functional indication of something (like as a kind of watchdog timer - if the pc has not hung in a crash, the leds will keep changing.)
The original white perspex moodcube sits inside my clear see-through acrylic PC case (Jeantech model) and so is visible from outside the PC.

My recommendation of the MX2 LCD display is not in the joke category at all.
I was happy I bought it and you can display stats of CPU temperature, fan speed, % of exponent tested. It is extremely useful, flexible and programmable, and unlike most LCD which are RS232 serial this supports USB (in addition to serial on a header). It also has a few buttons, so you could implement stop/start GIMPS by button press with on-lcd confirmation of the toggle without having to refer to a conventional monitor screen do see what you're doing. Fairly expensive but nonetheless has many applications.

Power usage monitoring device
 

Moo,

OK, I just bought a device which plugs between the electricity supply and computer and will indicate amps, watts, volts, kwh power consumption etc

This was an extremely good buy. Get one.

I am currently analysing my computers to establish:

a) how much extra electricity cost per year a business would spend running prime95 on a machine (or lots of them) as to not running it
b) eg on one machine I see watts jump from steady 35W to steady 50W when I invoke mprime at the command prompt. I would have no visibility of this without a monitoring device.
c) whether integrated graphics is more efficient of power than plug in agp card etc
d) what the actual cost of my prime processing is if I leave off a harddrive and boot without it.

These are important questions relating to the "bang for buck" debate. eg having something that although expensive does more prime testing might seem good until you factor in your high power consumption. A proper equation factors in the electricity bill, a component which until now has been missing in any quantitative form.

There is so much speculation about this on the forum and most of it based on rumour and guesses than any measurements whatsoever. eg does northwood use more power than prescott, is 0.9nm chip process using less power in system as a whole. Does having a 550W psu use more power than a 300W psu in your pc.

I will post my conclusions in a separate thread when I have done some more experiments.

If you are in the UK the usual price £25 is down to only £12.50 as a special offer until near the end of January. I am so pleased I will be buying another one. From [url]www.maplin.co.uk[/url] order code L61AQ.

It's made by [url]www.prodigit.com[/url] model 2000MU-UK (who make big high-end monitoring systems but you won't find this compact entry-level product detailed on their website). I suspect there are similar products in the USA if you need non-uk operations. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt-hour anywhere for comparison purposes though. In the UK cost varies by utility company and tariff you have and payment method, but shopping around, can typically achieve unit cost (kwh) of 5 pence for residential supply. Large companies can negotiate price breaks so don't know what they can get it down to.

I've already been amazed that my laptop wasn't more energy efficient than my compaq deskpro desktop. (I assumed laptops were designed to be energy efficient because of the battery powering option).

Power monitoring is endless fun for the price of a bottle of wine. And it could pay for itself in saved electricity over years.

I hope your consider this "part" suggestion to be immensely more practical than sticking holograms in your case, and a little more affordable than the optical FFT DSP.

[QUOTE=Peter Nelson]
a) how much extra electricity cost per year a business would spend running prime95 on a machine (or lots of them) as to not running it.[/QUOTE]However, in a miserable climate like ours, we have to pay good money to generate heat anyway. I'm not saying it's cheaper to use electrical fan heaters than, say, gas-fired central heating, but nonetheless the energy consumption is off-set somewhat.

The radiator in my study is mostly turned off because the room is kept warm by my fan heaters. A useful byproduct of all these heaters is a significant amount of computation.


Paul

post test results once u finish.....