[Beowulf] Parallella (Adapteva) update #25

[Eugen Leitl]

Project Update #25: Progress Report

Posted by Adapteva Like

The last few weeks have been VERY busy. We are pushing forward in parallel on
many fronts and making good progress.

Prototypes

The builds for the $10k and $2.5k backer prototype boards are on order and it
looks like we will ship the complete kits by December 31st!

Parallella Software:

Together with Brown Deer Technology we created the first open source OpenCL
implementation on an ARM platform.(as far as we know).  A short video of an
N-body galaxy simulation running on the Parallella prototype can be found
here: http://youtu.be/xRzed75bsjk

Parallella Hardware News:

We came up with an inexpensive high speed daughter card (GPIO) design for the
Parallella board that we are REALLY excited about.  Others that saw the
concept were equally impressed. Sorry..we can't tell you more than right now.
Detailed Parallella board spec information will be released by December 15th.

Community:

Providing active support for the Parallella community is just as important as
the hardware and software specs, so we are working on bringing in a community
leader to help us support a vibrant Parallella community. A forum will be set
up on Parallella.org by December 15th.

Early SDK Access:

We were waiting for the Kickstarter survey responses from backers to create
user accounts. ~90% of them are now in and we will have the early SDK access
set up by December 1st.  Look for a personalized email from us with login
information.

Logistics:

Growing from having 10 customers to almost 5,000 customers overnight was a
bit of a shock, but  obviously a very good thing:-) We are working on
building up the team, infrastructure, and partnerships to ensure that we can
properly handle EVERY backer/customer.

Other:

Last week the phrase "the sun never sets on Parallella" came into play:-).
Within 24 hours, Parallella was presented at the Energy Efficient HPC BOF at
SC12 in Salt Lake City (http://www.eehpc.com/sc12-bof-eehpc), in Japan for
the Embedded Conference together with Hakuto, and in the UK by Embecosm
(http://oshug.org/event/22).  In all places, we met Parallella backers which
was incredibly rewarding! On December 5th, I'll be giving a keynote at the UK
Manycore developer conference in Bristol.
(http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Research/Micro/ukmac2012.jsp).  Hope to meet some
of you there!

To our US backers, we wish you a Happy Thanksgiving! We are truly thankful
that we have so many great Parallella backers!

Best wishes,

Andreas