Parallella Hardware

Introduction
The Parallella board was inspired by hardware communities such as Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard and Arduino, and aim to democratise access to parallel computing by providing an affordable open high-performance computing (HPC) platform.

The platform is being built on the following principles:


 * Open Access: all architecture and SDK documents openly published on the Web — no NDAs or special access required.
 * Open Source: software platform based on free and open source software (F/OSS) development tools and libraries. Board design files provided under an open source hardware license once the Parallella computer ships.
 * Affordable: the goal is to bring the hardware cost to below $100, making it an affordable platform for all.

Key features
The key features of the board are: a Xilinz Zynq SoC which provides a Dual ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor plus programmable logic, 16 or 64-core Epiphany floating-point accelerator (32/100 GFLOPS) and high bandwidth expansion via daughter cards.

Kickstarter
The initial run of Parallella computers is being funded via a Kickstarter campaign, which on 27th October 2012 had succeeded in raising $898,921 via 4,965 backers, and with those pledging $99 or more receiving at least one board.

Thanks to generous support from Xilinx the Kickstarter boards will be upgraded to use a Zynq-7020 SoC instead of a Zynq-7010.

Availability
Work is being done to put distribution in place but a date for post-Kickstarter orders has not been confirmed as yet. In the meantime interest can be registered using a form on the project website.

Prototypes
The first Parallella prototypes shipped in late December 2012 and comprise of a ZedBoard plus a 16 or 64-core Epiphany FMC.

From a software perspective the prototypes are virtually identical to the final form factor boards.

Specifications
Please note that these are preliminary specifications and subject to change.

For further details see the Parallella Reference Manual.