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…
In this post I’d like to introduce Erlpiphany, the Erlang NIF library interface to the Epiphany chip. With this library, the Erlang developer can embed the power of Epiphany-accelerated computing in their application. Background I’ve followed the development of Parallella since the announcement of the Kickstarter project, so it was with great excitement that I finally managed to purchase a…
In the last instalment we cycled through a number of work groups each containing two cores, within the work group these cores ran slightly different applications to demonstrate parallel operation. The output of these applications consisted of the coreid and a simple identifier as to which core in the work group had generated it. Rather helpfully this application provides a platform to…
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…
Having cycled through each of the processors within the 16 core epiphany and run the hello world programme the next stage is to utilise the parallel processing capabilities and run the hello world programme at the same time on multiple processors. This is very simple to do and allows me to introduce a few simple concepts which we will be…
Over the last two blogs I have provided a simple overview of the Parallella board and the software development environment. The next logical step is to create a simple application which is run on each core of the epiphany device in turn and performs a simple hello world type application. Achieving this will ensure we understand how to: Use of…
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…
