Adapteva announces first $99 supercomputer boards built

Chip-company Adapteva has announced that it has build its first parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing. Those who had backed the Parallella Kickstarter campaign will be getting their hands on the processor board, named the Parallella, by summer. The company has given us the first proper look at the complete Parallella processing board. Judging by the pictures, Adapteva does indeed seem to live up to its promise of having a credit card-sized supercomputer.The Parallella has been built with the purpose of making supercomputers more powerful. While Linux was the operating system of choice for supercomputers, building a fast one has always been a tricky issue. According to the company, "The goal of the Parallella project is to democratize access to parallel computing."It is essentially a credit card-sized parallel-processing board, much like the Raspberry Pi. It has a dual-coore ARM A9 processor and a 64-core Epiphany Accelerator Chip. Along with this, it has 1GB of RAM, a microSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet and an HDMI port. In theory, the processor board should be able to give a performance of about 90 GFLOPS, which is the same performance as that given by a 45GHz CPU. All the while, the board will consume only about 5 watts worth of power under typical work loads.

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