Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer:
Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, that they've built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing, and that they'll be sending them to their 6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer.
What Adapteva has done is create a credit-card sized parallel-processing board. This comes with a dual-core ARM A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Multicore Accelerator chip, along with 1GB of RAM, a microSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, and an HDMI connection. If all goes well, by itself, this board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or in terms PC users understand about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU.
This board will use Ubuntu Linux 12.04 for its operating system. To put all this to work, the platform reference design and drivers are now available.
The project required, and got, the support of other hardware OEMs, including Xilinx, Analog Devices, Intersil, Micron, Microchip, and Samtec. The companies have enabled Adapteva to bring its first per-production boards to San Francisco, and soon, to its eager programmer customers.