"I can get my feet wet with parallel processing on a multi-core PC just fine" No, you can't, unless you pay severals orders of magnitude more than $99. (Afford

"I can get my feet wet with parallel processing on a multi-core PC just fine" No, you can't, unless you pay severals orders of magnitude more than $99. (Affordable)Multi core today means 2,4 cores at most . You can get your feet wet with the graphics card though. I did, and this is the reason I'm backing this project. Parallel computing is a different paradigm that serial, in fact is almost the opposite, instead of a big central memory you program for small distributed blocks of memory. Taking this into account means x200 faster than just not. Once you have a parallel design you can change it for different platforms or even hardware.(witch is parallel by nature), very easy. But you need a platform that is flexible(more than FPGAs) and near to software tools enough for testing and this is great.