Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
Networked ODW-EFIKA University Computer Lab.in category Applications & Software
proposed by morgoth6 on 31st January 2006 (accepted on 10th February 2006)
Project Summary
The idea is to deploy a networked loboratory with ODW and EFIKA boards on university in Czestochowa (Poland)This would make a great oportunity to present students the architectural diffrences between the CPUs and the other hand the standards common to both platforms. I think it's quite important to make students understand that they can take advantage of the PPC strong points while using the same peripherals and parts as they would buy for their PC units.
In our institute we strongly encourage use of the GNU/Linux operating system - most of the laboratories are Linux based - and our students are in general familiar with diffrent aspects of this software platform.
We already offer courses in using Linux as a software development and deployment enviroment, Linux administration, high-performance and parallel programing. We plann to include some laboratories about efficient PPC programing including AltiVec oriented optimizations.
Beside the educational applications we would be able to make use of the laboratory after hours as a computational resource. Setting the laboratory as a part-time, grid-enabled cluster would be quite easy having in mind that it's standard practise to have single-system-image on the computers in a laboratory. In our institute we develop many diffrent applications that will be able to make use of such a resource.
Project Blog Entries
OK, Efikas are here then I guess it's time to start some things.
First we need to order hardware required to setup laboratory, but before then I steal one of the machines to test/check some things.
First I decide to try Debian just to check is board ok, but to be honest I realy doesn't like this distribution and finaly I use it only to install Gentoo.
I bootstraped it from stage1 using gcc 4.1.1 and uClibc on my Pegasos2 and move to Efika. It seems to work just fine, but:
- uClibc seems to be quite problematic as it is not 100% compatible with glibc. Some packages fails to compile and need some changes, some are masked for uClibc profile (glib2 for example)
- HD performance is realy poor. On my 40GB Samsung HD I was able to get 2MB/s with almost 100% CPU usage. Now I want to test the SDMA IDE driver and I hope to see higer numbers this time.
If someone wants to see my gr8 case for Efika:
- http://tbs-software.com/morgoth/files/private/HPIM2154.JPG
- http://tbs-software.com/morgoth/files/private/HPIM2157.JPG