Computing energy is being squeezed into smaller and cheaper packages on a regular basis. Not way back, {hardware} hackers had been drooling over reasonably highly effective microcontrollers that may very well be had in single unit portions for round a greenback. Now comparable chips can be found for only a few cents. At that value, one can order a whole lot of them for a couple of tens of {dollars}. That temptation is simply too nice to go up, main many hobbyists to fill their spare components bins with trays of those microcontrollers, as a result of certainly they are going to be sorely wanted at some unknown level sooner or later, similar to all of these different unused components … proper?
Engineer and electronics hobbyist bitluni discovered a use for big portions of the CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller that could be very widespread lately, largely as a result of they are often bought for a couple of pennies. Beforehand, bitluni constructed a supercluster consisting of 16 CH32V003 chips, related by an 8-bit knowledge bus, and a service board to interrupt out the GPIOs to headers. Certain, that’s fairly cool, however solely 16? Is that one of the best you are able to do?
Many people are aware of bitluni’s previous work, and naturally the reply to that query is “no.” That preliminary work was expanded upon to create a 256-core RISC-V supercluster. You heard that proper ― 256 CH32V003 chips clustered collectively. The essential concept was to take the present 16-chip supercluster board and tile it. By connecting 16 of those boards collectively, a complete of 256 chips could be accessible for compute jobs.
Scaling up is usually a humorous factor, nonetheless. 16 processors would possibly be capable to share a typical bus with out difficulty, however if you put 256 processors on the bus, issues get actual busy actual quick. So to keep away from fixed collisions and sure electrical points, bitluni designed some secondary boards to interrupt the information bus into segments.
The person superclusters had been hooked into boards referred to as cluster blades to maintain their buses separate. This cluster blade had its personal microcontrollers to handle these particular person buses and transfer the site visitors to a second 8-bit bus. The cluster blade buses had been then all hooked as much as one other board referred to as the mega cluster blade. The entire buses, below the management of one other microcontroller, had been then made accessible through USB in order that exterior programs may entry the chips.
However after firing the system up for the primary time, it shortly turned clear that it was not working as designed. Because it seems, bitluni forgot so as to add a command line to one of many buses, which is the mechanism by means of which a processor requests entry to the bus. Making new PCBs and assembling the whole lot once more would have been an enormous ache, however bitluni seen that the clock sign was solely used when a chip was accessing the bus, so this sign was repurposed to additionally function the command line.
That did the trick, and the huge cluster of low cost chips was up and operating. In whole, the cluster consisted of 256 RISC-V 48MHz compute chips, 17 extra RISC-V chips operating at 144MHz for assist features, and 640 GPIO pins. What can such a cluster be used for? Properly, that’s nonetheless up within the air. To this point, bitluni has used it to blink a complete lot of LEDs. Typically it’s extra in regards to the journey than the vacation spot.Now that is what I name blinkenlights! (📷: bitluni)
CH32V003 chips galore (📷: bitluni)
