
Ask HN: Are Parallela boards useful? Still made? - jason_slack
I was considering using a Parallela board (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parallella.org&#x2F;buy&#x2F;) however I am a bit confused.<p>Is this project still active anymore?<p>I read reviews that the boards are flaky and hard to work with.<p>What are uses of the GPIO? I hear you basically need to buy the porcupine board to access the GPIO ports easily.<p>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.
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There'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
Thank 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!

