750K is OK for a crowdsourced parallel platform, but why not a million bucks?
Published:
This is a great day for the open source, open hardware and open funding community – it seems that the Parallella project by Adapteva that we wrote about earlier this month will reach its $750K mark, which was not so sure just several days ago.
I just bought myself this $99 massively multicore parallel computing platform as – by sheer coincidence – it’s my birthday tomorrow, which is when the campaign ends.
And I thought – OK, this is exciting, but would it not be better if they managed to raise a million dollars instead? I am certain Andreas and his team will do a wonderful job irrespective of how much exactly they manage to raise, but imagine the news! “A crowdsourced parallel computing platform gets $1M” – that would make my (birth)day.
Several weeks ago, at Embedded Conference Scandinavia which brought so many interesting developments for us that we did not even have the time to blog about it, I just happened to miss Andreas’ presentation about Epiphany, their impressive CPU. When I learned about this, I was quite furious – a collaboratively funded CPU was just what we at Antmicro had been discussing several days earlier, an inspiring idea that someone would come up with sooner or later. Turns out it was even sooner than we had thought!
Well, I might have missed out on a cool presentation then, but let’s not miss out on this wonderful opportunity. Parallella is not just some crowdsourced project, it is an attempt to get several thousand parallel development kits out to people. Adapteva are doing a wonderful thing – telling the community that it’s their job to find the parallel computing paradigms of tomorrow.
So, without further ado – see the pitch, buy the boards – they’re worth it. Especially that the Epiphany computing clusters fit into Zynq-based devboards, and Zynq is another cool technology we’re also working with:
