Sure it will work. We already can use the Raspberry Pi.

I have a RasPi (actually 2). From the first batch even. I was of course curious about crunching with the Pi. I installed the software, pretty straight forward.

Fact is that with MB V6 my RAC stabilised at about 14. I do not know if the software has been upgraded to V7, but it would for sure not top higher than 7 (no pun intended... or yes? ;-) ).
So, it is fun, but actually of very little use even for the not die hard credit seekers.

Happy crunching!

Sleepy

Sure it will work. We already can use the Raspberry Pi.

I have a RasPi (actually 2). From the first batch even. I was of course curious about crunching with the Pi. I installed the software, pretty straight forward.

Fact is that with MB V6 my RAC stabilised at about 14. I do not know if the software has been upgraded to V7, but it would for sure not top higher than 7 (no pun intended... or yes? ;-) ).
So, it is fun, but actually of very little use even for the not die hard credit seekers.

Happy crunching!

Sleepy

See Daniel Carrions blog here for various Raspberry Pi apps including multi-beam v7. Yes they are rather slow but at $35 each you can have a few of them.

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BOINC blog

IIRC, there was some discussion here a few years back about using ASIC's and/or FPGA's as dedicated SAH crunchers.

However, acquiring the hardware and developing the software to run BOINC, as well as any projects you'd want to crunch wouldn't be cheap, and since there ain't no cake to be had for the effort and cost in the BOINC world one would need to have pretty deep pockets with no place better to put it. ;-)

OTOH, it would be a pretty cool and interesting project to sink ones' teeth into. :-D

A lot of flexible and configurable FPGA hardware and software has already been developed and is available "off the shelf" in an open source environment. It is oriented toward Astronomical Signal Processing. That is, you don't have to start from scratch.

Here is one such component: ROACH

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"It is often darkest just before it turns completely black."

IIRC, there was some discussion here a few years back about using ASIC's and/or FPGA's as dedicated SAH crunchers.

However, acquiring the hardware and developing the software to run BOINC, as well as any projects you'd want to crunch wouldn't be cheap, and since there ain't no cake to be had for the effort and cost in the BOINC world one would need to have pretty deep pockets with no place better to put it. ;-)

OTOH, it would be a pretty cool and interesting project to sink ones' teeth into. :-D

A lot of flexible and configurable FPGA hardware and software has already been developed and is available "off the shelf" in an open source environment. It is oriented toward Astronomical Signal Processing. That is, you don't have to start from scratch.

Here is one such component: ROACH

Agreed, that's what ML1 and I were talking about.

And yes, I went back and took a look at ROACH, but the cost of building the hardware and the time to adapt the software to do this end of the signal processing isn't exactly what I would consider cheap. ;-)

So we're back to 'deep pockets' again. :-D

So we're back to 'deep pockets' again. :-D

Yup. I just circled around the looping argument again to get back to this point.

I would love to have a rack (or bookshelf!) full of cheap boxes on my local wireless intranet controlled by a netbook. If you want a greater crunch rate, you just buy another cheap box!

Hopefully, going forward, the hardware will get faster, consume less electicity (& so run cooler), and get really cheap.

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"It is often darkest just before it turns completely black."

When I first brought up the possibility of ASIC chips, I was not so interested in speed as I was cost of ownership vs. number crunching. If we look at the price of a pc with all of its hardware to crunch and then add more and more expensive hardware to crunch then to some, it becomes cost ineffective to crunch. Not to mention the price of electricity a pc and it's associated hardware uses.

If we have chips that are low power and low cost, then we could build crunching rigs as we go. If I was not sending less on electricity, then I could add some more chips to a rig as I went. It would increase the crunching.

Now, I know about the Parallella, so do you think something like it could work?

Sure it will work. We already can use the Raspberry Pi. The Parallella is a dual core ARM A9 so it's like two Pi's. The unknown is how well the Epiphany chip will run a SETI OpenCL app.

There is hope that Parallella board will give much more than just their 2-cores main CPU. Adapteva's chip should be able to process as well via OpenCL API at least.

EDIT:
BTW, "CPU" chip used there has programmable logic part too. So, one could imagine that for ultimate optimization re-flashing of this chip could be possible dropping HDMI support (for example) and using free chip space if any for let say FFT speedup. But this would be not so easy to done... but (perhaps) doable. Parallella hardware specification will be open source so such chip re-design at least potentially should be possible. But some experienced with such PL chips peoples will be required for this. And this part (taking into account how small number of software-oriented peoples working on SETI currently) looks much more impossible than anything else...( of course while we are speaking about volonteers. With proper financing this could be solved, but... again, where are those "proper financing"...)

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