cnce:
A Kickstarter campaign seeking to build a US$99 “supercomputer for everyone” saw its funding target of $750,000 comfortably met on Saturday, raising just shy of $900,000 in pledges. The Parallella is billed by its designers at Adapteva as an affordable, open and easy parallel computing platform based on the company’s own multicore Epiphany chips. It’s perhaps more realistic to think of Parallella as a highly efficient piece of parallel computer engineering rather than a supercomputer. Though the term supercomputer is ill-defined, the word tends to conjure images of room-filling, petaflop-crunching mainframes (though the term mainframe is hardly more concrete). This ain’t that. What it is, though, is a powerful parallel computer complete with Adapteva’s 16-core Epiphany-III processor which the company claims is capable of 32 GFLOPS peak performance while consuming no more than 2 watts of electrical power. The company claims that a Parallella has “10–50 times more performance” than the Raspberry Pi. If 16 cores sounds impressive then consider that, had Adapteva reached its stretch goal of $3 million, then its aim was to ship 64-core Epiphany-IV-based Parallellas come May 2013. In any case its development roadmap leads to 1000-core processors come 2014. (via Parallella: supercomputing for the masses?)
via wildcat2030