While the Parallella board is capable of delivering industry leading GFLOPS/watt performance (doing more with less energy), it is a small and densely populated board and it’s vital that adequate cooling is provided. Without which there may be temporary or even permanent failures. Kickstarter boards and those ordered via the Adapteva shop prior to 10th July came supplied with a…
Brian Guarraci is a software engineer at Twitter and in his spare time he’s building a Parallella cluster with a design that was inspired by two of the most iconic supercomputers ever made. When we saw pictures of Brian’s cluster we were impressed and when we shared these with the community, it became apparent that we were not the only…
An introduction to how the Parallella board FPGA can be configured for “headless” operation (no HDMI controller) and alternative expansion. The Parallella’s Zynq chip provides not only a dual-core ARM processor and peripheral interfaces such as Ethernet and USB, but also a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that greatly increases the flexibility of the platform. In Zynq parlance these are termed…
Now that production of the Parallella has been ramped up and boards are shipping in volume to Kickstarter backers, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the currently available case options and cooling requirements. The board can be used without any sort of enclosure, but it’s obviously important to ensure that it’s placed on a dry,…
Hooking up an LCD to display real-time system information. This post takes a look at how you can access the Parallella I2C bus via a breakout board, use it to interface a 16 character x 2 line LCD, and then drive this via the LCDproc software. Although there are many other types of display that could be interfaced via I2C…
It’s been a little while since I posted an update and what follows is outline of just some of the more recent activity in our community. Rev0 experiences, object detection and loaders In August notzed received his Parallella Rev0 board and since then he’s been blogging about his thoughts and experiences concerning an object detection application, scheduling, and linking and…
Over the past few months momentum has been building in the community, here is an attempt at providing a round-up of current software projects and I’ll apologise in advance for any omissions! APL Dr Beau Webber has been working on adding Epiphany support to the APL to C compiler, aplc. To find out more about the array-oriented language and for…
Two open source projects which will be participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013 are inviting applications from students interested in Parallella related projects. In both cases the Parallella project will supply hardware to students along with co-mentoring from Yaniv Sapir (Adapteva), and if necessary provide network access to a prototype board. GNU Radio The GNU Radio project’s ideas…
Parallella is much more than simply a hardware project, and software that is able to harness the power of massively parallel systems is going to be crucial to achieving our goal of making parallel computing accessible to everyone. This includes everything from languages and frameworks that make such systems easier to program, through libraries and toolkits that provide the building…
FMC daughter card complete with an Epiphany IV 64-core chip In a post on Adepteva’s website on Tuesday Roman announced that they had completed integration of the Epiphany IV 64-core chip with the Parallella prototyping platform. Explaining how 16 and 64-core packages had been designed to be virtually pin-compatible, allowing the same PCB to be used with only minor changes…
