Imagine the pace of innovation, change and breakthrough that could happen if supercomputing was made affordable, accessible and adaptable to the average developer.

It’s a dream that isn’t far off becoming reality with the ‘Parallella’ – a $99 credit-sized ‘supercomputer for everyone’ that has just over 1 day left to reach its funding goal of $750,000.

Should it reach its goal, the team behind the Parallella, Adapteva, say the world would gain access to cheap and open-source parallel-computing hardware, software and development tools.

[box style=”info”] Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. (Wikipedia) [/box]

Specifications

The Parallella computer board will, if funded, comprise of:

A dual core ARM A9 CPU

Epiphany Mutli-core Accelerator

1GB RAM

USB, Card Reader & Ethernet

The operating system powering all this? Ubuntu, of course.

If that all sounds a bit, well, standard, fear not. Adapteva explain:

“Once completed, the 64-core version of the Parallella computer would deliver over 90 GFLOPS of performance and would have the the horse power comparable to a theoretical 45 GHz CPU [64 CPU cores x 700MHz] on a board the size of a credit card while consuming only 5 Watts under typical work loads.

For certain applications, this would provide [more] raw performance than a high end server costing thousands of dollars and consuming 400W.”

Support Parallella

The Parallella needs $750,000 to become a full-blown reality, $618,000 of which it already has. That leaves 30-ish hours (at the time of writing) to raise the remaning $132,000.

Under Kickstarter rules, if a project does not meet its funding goal it gets nothing, and no-one is charged.

For further details, or to pledge, visit the Parallella Kickstarter page by hitting the button below:

Parallella Supercomputer on Kickstarter