Last week we put together the first large scale Parallella cluster. The system consisted of 42 Parallella boards (for a total of 756 CPUs), with the total power consumption coming in under 500 Watts. This makes it possibly one of the densest clusters in the world thanks to the Parallella board! We have been drinking the Parallella cool-aid for a long time, but we were still surprised by how easy it was to put together.:-)
By putting together our very own Parallella cluster we received validation that we are finally ready to ship our gen-0 Parallella boards to backers. It has certainly been a long time coming! It seems like ages ago (IN FACT IT WAS!) that we shipped the bulky Parallella prototypes. Yesterday we shipped the first credit card sized gen-0 Parallella board to a Kickstarter backer and approximately 40 more will go out this week to other early access backers (ROLF, 64-CORE-PLUS, and DEVELOPER reward levels) and folks who generously answered our cry for help a month back.
Today we also announced that we are ready take pre-orders for the 16-core Parallella board online at shop.adapteva.com. We are pleased so say that we were able to keep the entry point at $99 without losing money! It goes without saying that that the pre-orders will be fulfilled only after the Kickstarter backer orders have all shipped.
Lots more announcements and blog post coming up in the next week so stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Andreas
This is fantastic! I would love to hear some performance specs from this 42 board mini-monster.
It would be nice for a more compact and streamlined interconnect between boards (up to some sane maximum). The chip is extremely innovative and it would be nice to see some innovation on board interconnects as well.
I am extremely interested in developing for this board. I will keep a close eye on the project.
Fantastic- can you give us a look at the case you designed as that option in the kickstarter?
@Sean Lumly
You can connect boards together via the PEC_NORTH and PEC_SOUTH expansion (Epiphany Link) and PEC_FPGA (other/custom, e.g, high-speed LVDS of some sort).
If you look at the 4-board Cluster option in the Adapteva shop you will see that it includes “4 board-to-board flexible Epiphany link connector cables (up to 10Gb/s total bandwidth per cable)”.
So in terms of interconnect you can use Gigabit Ethernet, Epiphany Link and other/custom via FPGA. Plenty of options! And I suspect that in time to come we will see some interesting interfaces being implemented in the FPGA to enabling scaling and interconnect with other systems.
Cheers,
Andrew
Congratulations! Supercompute me: http://blog.chrisrussell.net/2013/07/23/parallella-board-order/ 🙂
@Andrew
Thanks for the information!
I just read on your Epiphany IP section of the shop that a 1024 core chip at 28nm would be a *tiny* 131mm2 including 32KB cache (I assume this does not include ARM cores), and achieve an insane 1.4TFLOP peak (900K coremark?!). Can this be right?
That is incredible performance from something that is little bigger than a mobile SoC — I read today that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S800 is ~118mm2. Granted mobile SoCs have more components, but the space efficiency for this level of performance is astounding.
This really is a supercomputer on a chip. Do you have plans to manufacture higher-core-count boards? I’m blown away.
I think I’m a believer. I’m actually really excited to get my hands on a board..
Finally! Congrats!!!! Can’t wait to get mine!
Thank you! Yes, the number are right. It’s really too bad that we don’t have had the resources of an Intel or Nvidia yet:-( If we did, the 1024 core chip would have been a reality a long time ago.
preordered and pretty excited to get my hands on it
Hi, I know I am not able o use a board like this, since I do not have sufficient knowledge. But I am following the progress of this project and I can foresee the size or revolution you are making. I am very, very impressed. Scientific projects like genetics, physics and other applications will be very easy and cheap with this board.
Congratulations. I love this kind of revolution. Keep going on. I wanna see the 1024 board asap.
Has anyone figured out how to change the shipping address?
Pretty amazing!
Any update on delivery to backers?
I’m holding out for the 7020 upgrade or I would have pre ordered. I’ll be buying it the minute it’s available.