Congrats. I'd love to see some real-life software (like WRF) port to that platform.
Parallella reached $750k funding goal
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#12Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of something like this?
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#13Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of something like this?
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.
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#14Oh 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.
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.
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#15I just cancelled my pledge, feel free to get that (it's a $99 level pledge)
You pledged just to see the project succeed ?
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#16For those wondering whats the difference between the Parallella and the Rasberry PI:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-ras...
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#17Congratulations. 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…
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…
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.
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#18Oh 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.
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, th…
It does seem that way, similarly I thought app.net wouldn't reach it's funding goal with a small amount if time to go and it made it easy.
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#19Seems like a lot of pent-up demand. What are the practical applications of something like this?
As visionscaper says, a lot of applications in vision and robotics, but I believe the incredible low power consumption offers broad potential in portable electronics, and also the datacenter. Imagine running an Erlang app on a single box crammed with thousands of these cores and a few TB of RAM.
They understand that the key is getting developers writing software in a new way, and the trick there is ubiquitous hardware. They also understand that it has to start as a co-processor, too, so they've married it to an existing ARM chip to provide peripherals and the host operating system. These decisions are very, very good ones, especially as compared to other multicore processor manufacturers (XMOS and GreenArrays are the two I'm thinking of).
Re: Parallella reached $750k funding goal
#20Oh 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.
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, th…
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.