Kickstarter page here.
As I didn't find a thread on this, I thought perhaps some of the coders on here might be interested in getting on board before the kickstarter finishes.
Parallella
Probably the best way to describe Parallella is as some sort of crazy mutant steroid-infused version of the Raspberry Pi. Although it's not related to the Raspberry Pi, it's similar in that it's a credit card sized computer with an ARM CPU, but it's also got quite a bit the Raspberry Pi doesn't (and a higher price point to go with it). For $99, you get a board with a Xilinx Zynq7010 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 16 core Epiphany processor, and the usual SD card, Ethernet, HDMI and USB ports. The Zync CPU is a dual-core ARM9 running at 800MHz with one notable difference; it's got a FPGA (with 28,000 logic cells) on-chip with it. While that won't mean much to non-techies, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are normally very expensive devices, so this is as cheap as you're going to get if you want to get your hands on some FPGA hardware (although making use of the FPGA is not for the uninitiated).
Epiphany Processor
The whole point of the project, though, is the Epiphany processor. Epiphany is a multicore architecture of basic RISC CPU cores with a high-bandwidth mesh interconnect between them. It scales from 16 cores (which you get on the $99 board) to 64 cores (you can get an engineering sample of which on a board for $750) and all the way up to 4096 cores in the future. The big advantage of this kind of architecture over something like, say, a GPU, is that you're working with proper C-programmable CPU cores, so you get proper task-level parallelism (ie you can have each core run completely different tasks on different data, whereas on GPUs you're limited to performing the same task on a set of data). The design's also very energy-efficient, with the board drawing 5 watts and even the 64 core chip drawing only 2 watts (while competing with server CPUs in certain benchmarks). There are a few disadvantages, particularly as far as memory is concerned, as the cores have no cache and only 32KB of local data memory each on current chips, so it's best suited to applications either with low memory requirements, or where memory can be easily managed. Nonetheless it's a really interesting design for those of us who wish to mess around with a properly "many-core" architecture.
What Can You Use It For?
Well, you could just ignore the Epiphany chip and use it as a cheap PC (it runs Ubuntu), but that'd be a bit of a waste. There are quite a few plans for different applications for it, like bitcoin mining (which it certainly should do well at from a bitcoins/watt ratio), running a Minecraft server, Folding@home, media transcoding, etc. There are some demonstrations already of it running computer vision code, and it could potentially do some very interesting things with a Kinect attached. With the FPGA involved, there are some interesting applications as a software-defined cognitive radio (ie performing wireless communications with the ability to change frequency on the fly to maximise bandwidth and avoid interference), although that's not necessarily something an end-user would make use of. Personally, I just want one to mess around with and see if I can't come up with some interesting ideas while learning a bit about parallel processing (my first project will be an inevitably shoddy path-tracer), and maybe going crazy at some point and trying to reconfigure the FPGA. Plus, by backing it I'm making it a lot more likely that at some point they'll be able to offer 64+ core boards at a reasonable price point, at which point things get really interesting.
As I didn't find a thread on this, I thought perhaps some of the coders on here might be interested in getting on board before the kickstarter finishes.
Parallella
Probably the best way to describe Parallella is as some sort of crazy mutant steroid-infused version of the Raspberry Pi. Although it's not related to the Raspberry Pi, it's similar in that it's a credit card sized computer with an ARM CPU, but it's also got quite a bit the Raspberry Pi doesn't (and a higher price point to go with it). For $99, you get a board with a Xilinx Zynq7010 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 16 core Epiphany processor, and the usual SD card, Ethernet, HDMI and USB ports. The Zync CPU is a dual-core ARM9 running at 800MHz with one notable difference; it's got a FPGA (with 28,000 logic cells) on-chip with it. While that won't mean much to non-techies, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are normally very expensive devices, so this is as cheap as you're going to get if you want to get your hands on some FPGA hardware (although making use of the FPGA is not for the uninitiated).
Epiphany Processor
The whole point of the project, though, is the Epiphany processor. Epiphany is a multicore architecture of basic RISC CPU cores with a high-bandwidth mesh interconnect between them. It scales from 16 cores (which you get on the $99 board) to 64 cores (you can get an engineering sample of which on a board for $750) and all the way up to 4096 cores in the future. The big advantage of this kind of architecture over something like, say, a GPU, is that you're working with proper C-programmable CPU cores, so you get proper task-level parallelism (ie you can have each core run completely different tasks on different data, whereas on GPUs you're limited to performing the same task on a set of data). The design's also very energy-efficient, with the board drawing 5 watts and even the 64 core chip drawing only 2 watts (while competing with server CPUs in certain benchmarks). There are a few disadvantages, particularly as far as memory is concerned, as the cores have no cache and only 32KB of local data memory each on current chips, so it's best suited to applications either with low memory requirements, or where memory can be easily managed. Nonetheless it's a really interesting design for those of us who wish to mess around with a properly "many-core" architecture.
What Can You Use It For?
Well, you could just ignore the Epiphany chip and use it as a cheap PC (it runs Ubuntu), but that'd be a bit of a waste. There are quite a few plans for different applications for it, like bitcoin mining (which it certainly should do well at from a bitcoins/watt ratio), running a Minecraft server, Folding@home, media transcoding, etc. There are some demonstrations already of it running computer vision code, and it could potentially do some very interesting things with a Kinect attached. With the FPGA involved, there are some interesting applications as a software-defined cognitive radio (ie performing wireless communications with the ability to change frequency on the fly to maximise bandwidth and avoid interference), although that's not necessarily something an end-user would make use of. Personally, I just want one to mess around with and see if I can't come up with some interesting ideas while learning a bit about parallel processing (my first project will be an inevitably shoddy path-tracer), and maybe going crazy at some point and trying to reconfigure the FPGA. Plus, by backing it I'm making it a lot more likely that at some point they'll be able to offer 64+ core boards at a reasonable price point, at which point things get really interesting.