The festive period is usually that time of year when everything grinds to a halt, but this couldn’t be further from the truth in the Parallella project!
It’s not even been three weeks since the forums launched and the enthusiasm demonstrated so far has been fantastic, and the uses to which backers have said they plan to put their hardware include:
- Volunteer/distributed computing with projects such as World Community Grid
- Sound processing
- Video encoding/transcoding
- Building a portable 3D scanner
- Experimenting with neural networks
- Facial/object recognition
- Researching parallel Lisp
- Software-defined radio
- Physical simulations
- Learning parallel programming
The Adapteva team have also been very much hard at work and on 31st December 2012 the first Parallella prototypes went out. Which from a software perspective are virtually identical to the finished boards, but obviously have a less compact form factor given that they make use of a Zedboard development kit combined with an Epiphany daughter card.
Adepteva’s Roman Trogan and Yaniv Sapir with the first prototypes
To find out more about the prototypes and some of the work that has had to be done to get this far, see Kickstarter Update #27.
Embecosm are the partner responsible for developing the SDK and they’ve now published the sources via the new Parallella organisation on GitHub. We had our first bug filed a few days ago — a minor issue with the build script — and this was promptly fixed.
We’ve also created a Flickr group as a place to collect together photos and screenshots.
There’s more exciting news to come but in the meantime build the SDK, help us test it and get involved via the forums!
Andrew
