Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone - Kickstarter Project

[vv111y]

Hi,

I'd like to promote this kickstarter project in the hopes it can actually reach its goals(s).

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone

I won't regurgitate all the info on the project page - I think they cover everything well enough. Where this really shines is in power consumption, and to me, in the promotion of an open-source, grass roots based community around the chip/platform.

Price/GFLOP is worse than if you got a current GPGPU setup. But:

1) these are the hobby setups to get You started on their system and getting up to speed with programming in OpenCL,

2) these are meant for smaller hacks a'la arduino & rasberry pi. There are 2 interfaces for connecting various hardware

3) any project that needs low-power but high performance

4) their boards that will directly compete with GPU's are coming out later with 1000+ cores. They'll still take 1/10th the power, saving electrical costs for both the board itself, cooling, cheaper PSU, etc, etc.

Also, the value is in promoting a community based platform which is an investment that will keep on giving returns long into the future.

This comment says it best I think:

Kai Staats 2 days ago

I spent ten years in supercomputing, building large scale systems built upon the POWER architecture. I was engaged in dozens of discussions with leading scientists at NASA, the DoE and DoD, at Universities and in the meetings with Freescale, IBM, and Sony -- and this is what everyone wanted to do, but no one could make it happen for the burden of the corporate structure.

The big guys are too blinded by short-term profit, answering to their shareholders in a roller coaster market to be able to take a step back and consider the long-term, the value in establishing a new paradigm for open source supercomputing.

Yes. You are doing this right. This is exactly how supercomputing should be developed. It is the only way for advanced parallel systems to take the next, big leap forward. No one company has the resources to make the philosophical and realworld breakthroughs in-house. Only through engaging the bigger landscape of closet genius, hacker kids, retired software engineers, and everyone in between can the true potential of an architecture be fully explored.

This is Arduino on steroids. Make if happen!

I've pledged $199 for the 64-core option if they reach $3 million,reverts to 2x 16 core systems if only $750K. Please spread the word, thanks!

[mobilenvidia]

Something a little different from our everyday stuff.

What I think is a worthwhile cause.