[Beowulf] Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella

[Eugen Leitl]

According to latest update first boards will be shipped next week,
so time for another refresher on Parallella

http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/12/supercomputing-on-the-cheap-with-parallella.html 


Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella
Blowing open the doors to low-power, on-demand supercomputing

by Federico Lucifredi |	 @federico_II | +Federico Lucifredi | Comments: 3 | December 10, 2013
   
Parallella topview

Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that promises to unleash industrial strength parallel processing on the desktop at a rock-bottom price. The Massachusetts-based startup recently ran a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and gained widespread attention only to run into a few roadblocks along the way. Now, with their setbacks behind them, Adapteva is slated to deliver its first units mid-December 2013, with volume shipping in the following months.

What makes the Parallella board so exciting is that it breaks new ground: imagine an Open Source Hardware board, powered by just a few Watts of juice, delivering 90 GFLOPS of number crunching. Combine this with the possibility of clustering multiple boards, and suddenly the picture of an exceedingly affordable desktop supercomputer emerges.

This review looks in-depth at a pre-release prototype board (so-called Generation Zero, a development run of 50 units), giving you a pretty complete overview of what the finished board will look like.

[SNIP]