$99 for Linux-based supercomputer home

For $99, can a Linux supercomputer be taken home? Yes, you are not mistaken. the chip company Adapteva announced the establishment of a Linux supercomputer.

According to ZDNet, chip company Adapteva announced at the Linux Collaboration Summit held in San Francisco, California on April 15 that they set up their first Parallella parallel processing board for Linux supercomputers.

$99 Linux-based supercomputer

Linux has always been the first choice for the supercomputer operating system. However, when you build your own Linux supercomputer using the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product, its running speed will not be abnormal. What you need is hardware that supports large-scale parallel computing-the cornerstone of modern Super Computing.

What Adapteva does is to create a parallel processing board with a credit card size. It includes a dual-core RAM A9 processor and a 64-core master-Display multi-core accelerator chip, 1 gb ram, a microSD card, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, and an HDMI connection. Theoretically, this motherboard should be able to provide performance of about 90 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS, 1 billion floating point operations per second), or, in PC users' understanding, it is equivalent to a 45 GHz CPU.

This parallel processing board uses Ubuntu Linux 12.04 as its operating system. To make it work smoothly, the reference design and driver of the platform are now available.

Why would you want a $99 supercomputer?

Of course, in addition to being cool, Andreas Olofsson, CEO of Adapteva, also gave you the reason to choose it:

Historically, serial processing (traditional computing) has improved so fast that in most applications, large-scale parallel processing is not necessary. Unfortunately, the performance of serial processing has reached the limit, and parallel processing is the only feasible way to expand performance in the future. To make parallel software applications ubiquitous, we need to expose all programmers to parallel processing, create more efficient parallel programming methods, and convert all serial programs into parallel programs.

Of course, Olofsson adds that "to make parallel computing understandable to everyone, we need to promote the process of adopting parallel processing in the industry" Parallella must be created. Olofsson admitted that his company could not do it on its own. This project is supported by other hardware vendors, including Xilinx, Analog Devices, Intersil, Micron, Microchip, and Samtec. Parallella parallel processing board debuted at the Linux Collaboration Summit and will soon be fully stocked. (Wang Xudong/compile Zhong Hao/review)