Adapteva Launches Parallella University Program

Adapteva, the company that unveiled a $99 parallel-processing supercomputer called Parallella earlier this year, has now announced the Parallella University Program (PUP). The purpose of the PUP program is to help ensure that academic institutions doing parallel programming research or education have access to inexpensive and open parallel computing hardware, according to information on the PUP site.

Participating institutions will receive free hardware and developmental software for parallel computing. As its first offering, the program will donate one of its Parallella-16 multicore processing platform devices for each 100 units sold. It will distribute the donated Parallella boards equally among institutions accepted to the PUP program. Adapteva is also inviting other companies to join the program and match Adapteva's donations.

The Parallella-16 devices are credit-card sized boards equipped with Adapteva's energy-efficient Epiphany multicore processor and the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoCs (system-on-chip), which includes a dual-core ARM A9 CPU. The Parallella-16 consumes less than 5 watts under typical workloads.

Selection criteria for institutions applying for the PUP program include:

  • Potential effect of proposed research or educational program;
  • Track record in the area of parallel computing; and
  • Level of openness in journal and source code publication.

"The present and future of computing is clearly parallel but the world is still struggling with the transition from the serial computing model that has served it well for decades," said Andreas Olofsson, CEO of Adapteva, in a prepared statement. "We created the Parallella platform to help make the world's first open and affordable platform for the development of massively parallel programs. With the Parallella University Program we want to do our part to help accelerate the transition to parallel computing."

Representatives from universities interested in the PUP program can apply online at parallella.org/pup. Universities must re-apply for the program each calendar year.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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