Some twenty years ago I set up a company to configure parallel computers for image processing applications. Unfortunately, demand wasn’t very high because of the poor price/performance ratio and the advent of RISC processors which surpassed it. I was therefore very excited when about a year ago Adapteva created a kickstarter project to offer affordable parallel computing to everyone. While I didn’t sign up for the kickstarter project I did order a parallella board through their shop. The board took quite sometime to arrive but is now running quite happily on my desk.
The Parallella Computer
The Parallella is a credit card sized computer that includes a dual-core ARM A9 CPU, a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and a 16 or 64-core Epiphany coprocessor. The Parallella is an extremely versatile platform that can be used as a standalone computer, an embedded device, or a component in a supercomputer architecture.
The Epiphany Coprocessor
The Epiphany multicore coprocessor is a scalable shared memory architecture, featuring up to 4,096 processors on a single chip connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network. Each Epiphany processor core includes:
- a tiny high performance floating point RISC designed specifically for multicore processing;
- a high bandwidth local memory system;
- an extensive set of built in hardware features for multicore communication.
The Epiphany coprocessor is ANSI-C and OpenCL programmable and works in cooperation with standard microprocessors to provide an unprecedented level of real-time processing performance and power consumption. This makes the device ideal for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Applications
The list of possible applications is quite large and included below.
Consumer:
- Smart-phones and tablet app acceleration
- High end audio
- Computational photography
- Speech Recognition
- Face detection/recognition
Computing Infrastructure:
- Super Computers
- Big Data Analytics
- Software Defined Networking
- Data-center Appliances
- High Frequency Trading
Mil/Aero:
- Radar/Sonar
- Extremely Large Sensor Imaging
- Hyperspectral Imaging
- Communication Jamming
- Military Radios
- Munitions/Guidance
Medical:
- Ultrasound
- CT
Communication:
- Communication test-bed
- Software defined radio
- Adaptive Pre-distortion
Industrial/Instrumentation:
- Machine Vision
- Autonomous Robots/Navigation
- Automotive Safety
- High Speed Data Acquisition/Generation
Other:
- Compression
- Security Cameras
- Video Transcoding
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