Remember the Parallella supercomputer by Adapteva? It's finally up for pre-order on its official website. The entry-level version of the main Parallella board itself is available for $99 (Rs 5,900 approx), and adding GPIO configuration pushes the price up to $119 (Rs 7,100 approx). Currently, it is only available in the Zynq 7010 configuration. The chip is slated to be delivered in October.
To make use of the Parallella, you'll also need a host of cables, since the board itself doesn’t come bundled with any. All the required cables are available in an Accessory Bundle for $39 (Rs 2,320 approx). The bundle includes a 16GB micro SDHC Class 10 memory card by SanDisk, a 5V/2,000mA UL-listed power adapter, a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, a USB 2.0 A-Male to Micro-B cable and a Male Micro-B to Female Standard-A cable.
If supercomputing’s your thing, you can opt for the Parallella Cluster Kit, which consists of four Parallella-16 boards hooked up to each other. It comes pre-loaded with four 16GB SD cards and Ubuntu 12.04. It also features 4 board-to-board flexible Epiphany link connector cables, with the possible bandwidth being up to 10Gb/s per cable. The Cluster Kit costs $575 (Rs 34,260 approx), and will be delivered in October.
The Parallella Cluster Kit should fulfill your supercomputing needs
The Parallella has been built with the purpose of making supercomputers more powerful. While Linux was the operating system of choice for supercomputers, building a fast one has always been a tricky issue. According to the company, "The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing."
It is essentially a credit card-sized parallel-processing board, much like the Raspberry Pi. It has a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Accelerator Chip. Along with this, it has 1GB of RAM, a microSD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and an HDMI port. In theory, the processor board should be able to give a performance of about 90 GFLOPS, which is the same performance as that given by a 45GHz CPU. All the while, the board will consume only about 5 watts worth of power under typical work loads.
The Epiphany multi-core chips consist of a scalable array of RISC processors that are programmable in C or C++. They are connected together with a fast on-chip network within a single shared-memory architecture.
To make use of the Parallella, you'll also need a host of cables, since the board itself doesn’t come bundled with any. All the required cables are available in an Accessory Bundle for $39 (Rs 2,320 approx). The bundle includes a 16GB micro SDHC Class 10 memory card by SanDisk, a 5V/2,000mA UL-listed power adapter, a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, a USB 2.0 A-Male to Micro-B cable and a Male Micro-B to Female Standard-A cable.
If supercomputing’s your thing, you can opt for the Parallella Cluster Kit, which consists of four Parallella-16 boards hooked up to each other. It comes pre-loaded with four 16GB SD cards and Ubuntu 12.04. It also features 4 board-to-board flexible Epiphany link connector cables, with the possible bandwidth being up to 10Gb/s per cable. The Cluster Kit costs $575 (Rs 34,260 approx), and will be delivered in October.
The Parallella Cluster Kit should fulfill your supercomputing needs
The Parallella has been built with the purpose of making supercomputers more powerful. While Linux was the operating system of choice for supercomputers, building a fast one has always been a tricky issue. According to the company, "The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing."
It is essentially a credit card-sized parallel-processing board, much like the Raspberry Pi. It has a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Accelerator Chip. Along with this, it has 1GB of RAM, a microSD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and an HDMI port. In theory, the processor board should be able to give a performance of about 90 GFLOPS, which is the same performance as that given by a 45GHz CPU. All the while, the board will consume only about 5 watts worth of power under typical work loads.
The Epiphany multi-core chips consist of a scalable array of RISC processors that are programmable in C or C++. They are connected together with a fast on-chip network within a single shared-memory architecture.
