[MikeHersee]

Hi Folks,

Is anyone experimenting with installing openfoam on the Jetson TK1 development board? The reason I ask is because with 192 cores, even if it has some limitations being a development board, at on £199 from Maplin in the UK and less in dollars in the US, it offers apparently very low power supercomputing at a ridiculously low price also. Given that CFD is intrinsically such a massively computationally intensive operation, this seems to me like a no-brainer - to attempt at least.

Anyone?

Mike Hersee

[wyldckat]

Greetings Mike Hersee,

From what I can see, that board is using NVidia's Tegra K1 chip, which is essentially an ARM CPU with integrated GPU. This means that you'll need to merge two compiling characteristics:

• Compiling for an ARM processor, which was done at least here: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...processor.html
• Compiling with a special library that extends the ability to solve matrices on GPGPU: https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/GPGPU

Beyond this, I'm not sure that such a machine is all that better, at least performance-wise. For conceptual development, it might be a good way to get started on this topic, since it's an ITX board with GPU integrated, which means that it costs less than half of a good x86 development machine with a dedicated GPU card.

The other detail is that this board would have to rely on 1Gbps Ethernet connection only or at least on some sort of hybrid Ethernet-USB 3.0 based network... in case multiple boards were to be used in parallel.

Best regards,
Bruno

[MikeHersee]

Ok, thanks for that analysis. I think it's probably way beyond where I'm at technically with Linux right now though, but I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't sound as though it would perform as spectacularly as I'd hoped it would.

Mike