On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Morten Groftehauge wrote:

So the Parallella project seems like it is going forward (with the smaller processor first off) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-... I figure that phenix would have problems with low amount of RAM but are there other reasons that Phenix and Parallella might not play well together?

I think it will have the same problems as GPU acceleration of MX code. Most of the components in Phenix that benefit from parallel systems work on a much coarser level (i.e. multiple CPU cores, or even clusters), and most of these have already been parallelized (composite omit map generation, building, ligand fitting, MR searches, Rosetta jobs, refinement weight optimization, etc.). Any further improvements in speed will require improving the underlying algorithms (which is definitely possible, if complicated), rather than adapting them to specialized hardware. There are scenarios where these parallel architectures could be useful, and we've explored a few of them here. But they're mostly things that we simply wouldn't bother doing otherwise, not the kind of stuff most crystallographers run every day. -Nat