Parallella 'supercomputers' headed to early backers | Hacker News Reader

Parallella 'supercomputers' headed to early backers

engadget.com

36 pointsSonicSoul11 comments

The boards also look to be really good value as an FPGA development platform with 32-bit RAM, USB, Ethernet and HDMI.

I agree, it's one of the factors that tipped me into pre-ordering (no word on my delivery yet though!)

There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-)

Still the most interesting bit of hardware to come down the pipe yet.

"There doesn't appear to be that much spare capacity, at least on the 7010's FPGA, around 2k cells IIRC? Certainly won't be creating a bitcoin miner in that :-)"

Depends on whether you'd like to use the Epiphany chip or not, as the FPGA logic used to interface with the Epiphany can be used for your own projects too (albeit with the catch that you lose the ability to access the full potential of the Epiphany chip). I'd be interested in using the Parallella board as a cheap Zynq dev board.

I think the hdmi implementation takes up most of the fpga, the epiphany interface footprint is quite small.

Good to know. I'm surprised they've gone down that route, suppose they're got to cut costs somewhere.

I remember that the early comments were pretty negative on the Parallella.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5557985

http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallel...

How does the product rate now that it's finished? I bought one and I think it should be shipping in the next week or two. My feeling was that good or bad, supporting the Kickstarter campaign might help spur the industry just a tad bit faster. We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.

> We really seemed to have stalled on multi-core general purpose computers.

We need better languages and paradigms to explore them.

The increase in FP and actors/CSP model use might help, but developers still need to learn how to use these tools effectively.

AFAIK they still haven't shown any benchmarks where their chip beats a similar-sized GPU (e.g. Temash). It still looks like faith-based computer architecture.

Has there been any news about running Erlang on one? I remembered seeing blog posts about it, but when I went back and looked, both were "coming soon" posts with no code.

I'm one of the backers, and honestly have no idea how I'll use the thing, but Erlang support would at least be cool to play with.

Probably the best place to keep track of Parallella development is on the forums. There is a Erlang subforum there too, though no news of an Erlang build that makes use of the Epiphany yet AFAIK... http://forums.parallella.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=d235e45f...

I am super excited about getting my board. Not because its some amazing piece of kit ( GPU's are currently better), but I think their architecture will be awesome if they can scale it up.

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