Adapteva Announces Support Program for $99 Parallel Computers

The revolution unleashed by open hardware boards such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi has reached the parallel programming industry with the recent announcement of Parallella: an open hardware parallel system that will soon be available for the entry price of only $99. Adapteva is building the parallella board as an education aid for universities and research institutions. The company has just announced that it will be sponsoring the Parallella University Program (PUP), which will provide hardware and other assistance to participating universities and institutions.

The Parallella board will come with Adapteva’s Epiphany multicore processor and the Xilinx Zync 7000 system on a chip, which includes a dual-core ARM A9 CPU. According to Adapteva, the whole system will consumer less than 5 watts under normal workloads. The company launched the project through a successful Kickstarter campaign and now has the momentum for a general public release.

According to Adapteva CEO Andreas Olofsson, “We created the Parallella platform to help make the world’s first open and affordale platform for the development of massively parallel programs. With the Parallella University Program, we want to do our part to help accelerate the transition to parallel computing.”