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Ask HN: Are Parallela boards useful? Still made?
I was considering using a Parallela board (http://www.parallella.org/buy/) however I am a bit confused.
Is this project still active anymore?
I read reviews that the boards are flaky and hard to work with.
What are uses of the GPIO? I hear you basically need to buy the porcupine board to access the GPIO ports easily.
My thought is that I could use this board to work on some algorithmic trading ideas I have. It is portable, I can take it anyplace with me and SSH into it from my laptop. I could also build a small cluster to work on some math problems modeling, etc.
- __d 9y agoThere's three related things: Parallella, Adapteva, and Epiphany. Parallella is the board project. Originally with 16-core and 64-core boards, I think only 16-core boards are still available. Epiphany is the CPU architecture. It has a bunch of limitations, but it's also small, fast, and low-power, so if your application works within those limits, it might be a good option. Originally specced to include 16, 64, and 1024-core chips, I think the 64-core and 1024-core variants are no longer available. And finally, Adapteva was/is the company. It ran a successful crowd-funding campaign for the Parallella project, but wasn't able to convert that momentum into an ongoing CPU-manufacturing business. Andreas Olofsson, the core of the whole thing, moved on to work at DARPA, I think, and I fear that's the end of the road. There's still some academic work done with the Parallella boards, and there's no reason you couldn't use one today, but I wouldn't expect there to be any new products in the family. I don't know anything about the GPIOs, sorry. For your algo, there's a bunch of cheap(-ish) FPGA boards out there. Unless you're planning to use the Epiphany chip as well as the Zync, you might be better off using something with a future roadmap?
- jason_slack 9y agoThank you for the reply. My thought was the Epiphany chip might be really well suited for making complex models of my potential trades. If you have a recommendation on other boards to look at, I am all ears!