Since the Parallella Kickstarter campaign in 2012 the one question I get more than any other is ” How the @#$% do I program this thing?” You are never going to become fluent in parallel programming without coding, so pick a card, any card. Let’s do some parallel programming! Thanks to the incredible open source work that has come out of the Parallella community…
#10. Best Price Performance There are cheaper single board computers out there, but starting at $99 the Parallella board is still the leader in terms of price/performance. 18 CPU cores, Gigabit Ethernet, 1GB RAM, and a Field Programmable Gate Array for $99 is a great deal! #9. Made in the USA The Parallella board was designed and manufactured locally here in New England…
I am very happy to tell you that the first Parallella Technical Conference (PTC ) (or “parallella meetup” if you like) will be held on May 30th in Tokyo, Japan!! A thousand thanks to Masafumi Ohta (who organized the first Raspberry Pi meetup in Japan) and RS Components for helping out with the organization of the event! DesignSpark announcement from Masafumi Ohta (in…
Last summer we started migrating the elink from Xilinx ISE to the new Vivado tools while also doing a complete overhaul of the design to improve performance, power, and maintainability. There is still optimization work to be done in terms of elink read/write performance, but I consider the new design to be a high quality starting point for future work. The new…
We have shipped well over 10,000 Parallella computers across the globe and we are now ready to move on to the next phase of making parallel computing ubiquitous. Unfortunately the energy needed to escape the current “von Neumann potential well” seems to be approaching infinity. The legacy programming stack is so effective and so easy to use that developers and…
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to a group of graduate students at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden. The talk was part of a 12 week course (Chalmers Computing Labs Tech Talks) intended to bridge the world of academia and industry by inviting speakers to talk about difficult product problems (and solutions) from different industries. Professor…
By all measures I am a very lucky guy. Weird serendipitous things happen so often that I have stopped being surprised. For example, what are the chances that the high school kid living next door would turn out to be an absolute engineering rock star? Well here in Lexington, MA (highest # of PhD per capita in the US), I suppose the…
The Parallella board was designed for one purpose SPEEEEED! This was the reason we chose the backside Samtec connectors instead of something more hacker friendly like a 0.1″ pin header. With the current Samtec backside connectors we have a total of 240 backside pins and a peak bandwidth of 50 Gbps, which is pretty insane for a credit card sized…
I am pleased to announce that we we have signed up Digi-Key as a distributor for the Parallella boards. Digi-Key is a first rate distributor with a massive line-card of in stock components and an incredible logistics operation. I am a long time customer of Digi-Key so seeing our products included in their portfolio is great feeling for me personally. In the US, they…
