$99 Parallella supercomputer appears on Kickstarter

[mmix]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...r-for-everyone

The Parallella project is being launched by Adapteva, a semiconductor startup company founded in 2008. The core development team consists of Andreas Olofsson, Roman Trogan, and Yaniv Sapir, each with between 10 and 20 years of industry experience. The team has a strong reputation of executing on aggressive goals on a shoe string budget. Our latest Epiphany-IV processor was designed in a leading edge 28nm process and started sampling in July, demonstrating 50 GFLOPS/Watt. To put this perspective, consider that the Epiphany energy efficiency specs are within striking distance of the 2018 goals set by DARPA for the high profile Exascale supercomputing project.

[stevea]

Interesting to see, however I'm puzzled. They (will) put 64 800Mhz ARM9 cores on a board and want to claim only 5 watts of power. That's way below any arm core power spec I know of. Their's a little pie overhead in that sky, but more power to 'em.

FWIW I have a feeling that ARM, esp the newer 64bit architecture is going to infringe on Intel's turf pretty soon.
http://www.apm.com/products/x-gene
It's may not be little AMCC bringing pain to Intel, but perhap TaiwanSemi might.

[mmix]

IMHO, they similar with tilera, but different architecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilera

The 100-core general purpose CPU consumes approximately 55 watts at full load.[2]

[ocratato]

With Apple's walled garden approach, and Microsoft trying to follow them, I was becoming a bit depressed about the future for general purpose computing devices. However, this, and things like the Raspberry Pi, and EOMA-68 that are an excellent fit for Linux does give one a bit of hope for the future.

[mmix]

if you like Raspberry Pi, don't forget cubieboard, btw, i think future device is something like graphene/silicene generation, NO-intel, NO-amd! yay!
http://cubieboard.org/

[mmix]

bump, ATM

2,627 Backers
$403,166 pledged of $750,000 goal

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...r-for-everyone

More evidence that the Epiphany multicore processor is a proper CPU

We are running about a day behind schedule in regards to updates this week, but things are moving forward quickly with the Parallella hardware platform.

We have now documented two more test cases to show that the Epiphany multicore processor is much more than just a floating point coprocessor. The Epiphany processor was designed to be an accelerator, but it's definitely NOT a GPU. It runs ANSI-C code like a regular CPU, but shouldn't be confused with powerful x86 processors. In a nutshell, the Epiphany multicore processor is really a new type of animal with its own set of features.

The following video shows a simple demo running on a Parallella prototype board with an Epiphany-III processor chip sitting on an FMC daughter card connected directly to an ARM-A9 SOC sitting on the carrier card. The final Parallella board will have all the components integrated on a single small board, but the basic system design will remain.(more on the Parallella board design tomorrow!) The example shows how work can be offloaded from an ARM A9 CPU to run more effectively in parallel on Epiphany processor.

The second example shows the results from running the open source CoreMark® benchmark from EEMBC® on the 28nm Epiphany-IV processor chip (EMEK4 eval kit). Amazingly, the Epiphany architecture reaches performance levels on par with server class microprocessors once all 64-cores are can work together, despite consuming less than 2 Watts at the chip level. Here is the full white paper.
http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers...-a-proper-cpu/

[Penguinclaw]

Originally Posted by mmix

if you like Raspberry Pi, don't forget cubieboard, btw, i think future device is something like graphene/silicene generation, NO-intel, NO-amd! yay!
http://cubieboard.org/

Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of it as they haven't found a UK supplier but it certainly looks an interesting product. I have a RaspberryPI and am totally amazed by what it is capable of Hopefully with the introduction of such affordable devices into schools and colleges our future generation will realise that there is more than Microsoft, Apple and Google!

[mmix]

Bump, in image, right down is the parallella.

[mmix]

Parallella: Low-Cost Linux Multi-Core Computing
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTIxNTQ

Expected to be on the Parallella computer is a Zynq-7010 Dual-core ARM A9 CPU, an Epiphany Multi-core Accelerator, 1GB of RAM, USB 2.0 support, Gigabit Ethernet, and will be loaded with Ubuntu OS. "Once completed, the 64-core version of the Parallella computer would deliver over 90 GFLOPS of performance and would have the the horse power comparable to a theoretical 45 GHz CPU [64 CPU cores * 700MHz] on a board the size of a credit card while consuming only 5 Watts under typical work loads. For certain applications, this would provide raw performance than a high end server costing thousands of dollars and consuming 400W."

Parallella is being pushed right now on Kickstarter and there's just 34 hours to go at the time of publishing while they are just at $596,192 of their $750,000 goal.

---------- Post added at 12:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:10 AM ----------

It is miracle!!!

ATM

3,856 Backers

$704,279 pledged of $750,000 goal

---------- Post added at 05:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:23 PM ----------

now it is funded! Yeah! kudos to all!

---------- Post added at 05:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:13 PM ----------

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ryone/comments

[mmix]

http://www.kurzweilai.net/parallella...r-for-everyone

The Parallella project aims to make parallel computing accessible to everyone. The project has successfully raised its Kickstarter.funding goal of $750,000, with $898,921 pledged.