

Parallella reached $750k funding goal - skrebbel
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone?foolhn

======
icelancer
I don't mind posting here and saying how wrong I was. Because on the original
post, I said for sure it wouldn't be funded.

To show that I have sufficiently eaten crow, I felt I should make this post
and pledge $99 + $20 (for a case) to them. And so I have.

EDIT: Clever use of the ?foolhn tag. I was going to post the Kickstarter link
to HN as penance for my doubting Thomas ways but I've never submitted
anything, and when I tried, I got a dupe check, so I didn't bother.

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malandrew
Congratulations. I was a doubter in the first thread on Parallela, but I'm
very impressed and happy that you guys achieved your goal.

I'd love to hear more about your plans to build a community around the boards
now. I'm working on building a community around a yet unreleased but announced
open source project myself (<http://famo.us/>) and I'm in the early stages of
planning everything.

Check out The Art of Community by Jono Bacon, the guy who was responsible for
the Ubuntu community. That book has a lot of good stuff.

<http://www.artofcommunityonline.org>

~~~
alexchamberlain
Building the community will be the success or failure of this project. We've
seen it with the Raspberry Pi and (to some extent) Ubuntu. They aren't the
best products in their field (IMHO; I've not made anything better), but they
have the best community. These days that means more than a mail list; it's the
forum and Q&A (stack exchange) sites as well.

Dear Founders, please please set up a Q&A site. They are much more effective
than forums.

~~~
DanBC
Some bits[1] of the Ubuntu community are decidedly sub-optimal.

Less bad than other parts of the Internet, but still not what I'd use as an
example of good practice.

[1] Sprawling support, often including support from people who know very
little about Linux or Ubuntu; gently toxic development lists.

~~~
malandrew
I think any community the size of Ubuntu is going to have parts that are sub-
optimal. I think it's unavoidable at that scale.

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new299
It's a shame they didn't hit the 3m goal. The device they were going to build
them seemed more competative. I think the 16 core device will probably be an
interesting toy though. Wrote my thought up here:

[http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-
parallel...](http://41j.com/blog/2012/10/my-take-on-the-adapteva-parallella/)

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netvarun
For those wondering whats the difference between the Parallella and the
Rasberry PI: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/09/99-ras...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/09/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-touted-in-kickstarter-
project/)

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anigbrowl
Oh good! I've posted about the project on HN a couple of times, but being
$150k short of the goal yesterday with only 24 hours to go I wasn't
optimistic.

~~~
kombine
My thoughts were exactly the same. In mere 8 hours yesterday they went up by
more than $100k. Is there any sorts of stats on Kickstarter to see which sizes
of pledges were contributed during a given period of time? Seems a little
dodgy to me - could they actually fund the rest of the campaign out of their
own pocket(they have a 2.5M investement after all)? But anyway I already
pledged $120 myself to get the board, they guys seem trustworthy.

Update: The links below reveal services for tracking campaign so I will
investigate: <http://www.kicktraq.com/> and
<http://canhekick.it/project/5064d31d8f647c24e5ad60d0>

Update2: So they raised $192k yesterday, October 26 with 903 backers which
averages to $212 per pledge. So it is all looks fine, perhaps that's how
campaigns generally behave.

~~~
vidarh
It seems it is the norm - lots of people were going back and upping their
pledges. They did a ton of updates, and offered cases (for an extra $20 per
unit) and a book (at $25) to pull in existing people. And a lot of those of us
who had already backed were also far more actively tweeting or otherwise
promoting it. Add on coverage here and several other places, and the time
pressure. Others pointed out yesterday that it's fairly common for Kickstarter
campaigns to get most of their funding in the first 72 and last 24 hours.

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CKKim
Do we know the specifics of the final funding? In the discussion yesterday
there were good comments flying around about founders maxing out credit cards,
general trends of most funding being in the first 72 and last 24 hours of a
Kickstarter campaign, and various other interesting arguments (not all
optimistic). I'd be curious what it came down to in the end.

~~~
alternize
here are two links that show the project's progress during its kickstarter
life:

[http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-
super...](http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-
supercomputer-for-everyone/)
<http://canhekick.it/project/5064d31d8f647c24e5ad60d0>

~~~
CKKim
Thank you, that's really cool.

EDIT: It answers one of {how, what} but not the other. Anyone got any more?

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hn_is_vile
Looking forward to getting my Epiphany next year. What an exciting time to be
alive.

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topbanana
Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of
something like this?

~~~
visionscaper
Personally I see a killer application of (clusters of) parallella boards in
machine perception for e.g. robotics and information retrieval/websearch. When
I talk about Machine perception it could, for instance, refer to advanced
visual object detection, recognition and tracking combined with pattern
recognition on other sensory modalities such audio and haptics.

To make high computing power portable, as could be needed for machine
perception applications in robotics, high power efficiency is needed. This is
something the Parallella is aiming for.

Machine perception algorithms using "brain-like" computation structures are
not only highly parallel by nature but also need fast access to memory.
Instead of having a thin pipe to a central memory, it needs to be distributed,
build close to/in to the computation cores.

The long-term vision of Parallella’s Epiphany multi-core processors indicate a
__1000 __cores per processor, with 128KB memory per core by __2014 __a
possibility(!) This is exactly the order of parallelism and distributed memory
Machine perception applications need.

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tarkus
I just cancelled my pledge, feel free to get that (it's a $99 level pledge)

~~~
agumonkey
You pledged just to see the project succeed ?

~~~
wtracy
I could see that. I pledged at the "cluster" level ($1000) when the project
looked likely to fail, then when it crossed the finish line I backed off to
the "personal cloud" level ($500).

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dchichkov
Congrats. I'd love to see some real-life software (like WRF) port to that
platform.

