COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Sept. 5, 2014
Speaker	Andreas Olofsson (Adapteva)
Topic	Presenting Parallella, the crowd-funded open source supercomputing project
Abstract:	Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as "a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced." The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing through affordable open hardware and open source tools so that the whole world can participate in solving this grande challenge problem. The Parallella is an open-hardware credit card sized single board computer that includes an ARM host processor, FPGA logic, and a massively parallel multicore RISC processor from Adapteva. The Parallella project was launched on Kickstarter in the fall of 2012 at an entry price point of $99 each. Parallella boards have now shipped to over 7,000 backers and partners in 75 countries and to over 200 Universities. The talk will give an in depth technical review of the Parallella platform and will conclude with examples of active research projects that have benefited from the Parallella project.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.