Architecture

The 3 possible architectures for Assothink (active jelly part) are:

• The basic architecture
• The intermediary architecture
• The target architecture

It is important to note that the passive jelly construction has nothing to do with these 3 architecture. The construction of the passive jelly is a previous step.

Basic architecture

Working on equipement available and cheap in 2010:

• standard intel PC
• 1 to 4 processors
• 1 to 16 Gb ram
• any graphic card
• standard hard disk
• linux ubuntu OS
• apache / tomcat...
• standard browsers (chromium preferred)
• standard JVM (java platforms)

The java emulation of assothink runs on 1 machine, 1 process, multiple threads.

Available as GWT application working within a browser. Check it at www.assothink.com.

This is the first tested architecture of assothink. It ran from 2010, on the Matscape machines.

Target architecture

The hardware suited to adequately run Assothink would be very simple but massively parallel, with millions of basic active components; highly interconnected.

This kind of hardware architecture is not currently available. 

Here is the dream: a dedicated set of millions of microchips, each working autonomously, intensively computing and mainly exchanging signals.

This might be suggested to some company producing wide scale IC (integrated circuits) products. An expensive project! This would be the most achieved and performing version of Assothink.

Intermediary architecture

This is a pragamatic compromise.

The goal is to maximize computing speed at a reasonale price (this written in 2012).

Various options are considered.

None yet is implemented.

Common

In all of these architectures,

many process and computers contribute to the running app (at least an interactive front-end and one or many computing daemons) 

the drawing is separated from the computing

DPDM architecture

Many machines connected in a TCP-IP network, one or many small process per machine.

Java emulation, thus java programming.

Describe and discussed at DPDM architecture .

GPGPU architecture

Based for instance on Nvidia's CUDA approach, on the computing capacity on graphic processors.

Problem: no java programming, strange programming model, proprietary approach.

Parallela architecture

Epiphany processors are created by US company Adapteva. There is a project to link 16 or 64 of them in a low cost machine (ubuntu). The project name is parallela.

Constraint: programming in C... specific code optimization.

Question: will this project reach its goals ?

Here some relevant links:

• www.adapteva.com
• project summary

Status: promising, but not obvious.

Development step prerequisite: have the active jelly run in a C program.