parallella is died. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

[roberto]

Parallella was a "one man company" with Andreas Olofsson as principale actor of it . Now that Andreas joined the "dark side" (http://www.darpa.mil/staff/mr-andreas-olofsson) all his time will go to new job and noone will be focused on parallella. Fearly, the new 1024 chip will be "coopted" by DARPA and bye bye to Community. We lived a sweet dream, now is time to wake up: no Ephiphany-V for us.

[nickoppen]

Roberto you are so dramatic!

It was amazing that the Parallella got off the ground in the first place. Yes the initial enthusiasm has waned but there are still some of the originals active and new people pop up all the time. There is still core development going on with the platform and the tools.

I've had my own businesses in the past and I don't judge anyone negatively for taking a salaried job. Taking on something big is tough.

I enjoy programming on the Parrallella because it is hard. Most people don't enjoy doing hard things. Some of the people who got involved early on were absolutely brilliant. I think that it comes with the territory that these people often have a short attention span. Others will come and the lessons learnt with the Parrallella are still out there.

I think that it will lead to something big in the future. I don't know when. It might be the E-V but maybe not.

Best regards,

nick

[sebraa]

I am sure that the Epiphany V will be a thing. Just not for us.
We have to live with the Parallella and the Epiphany-III, and there won't be a future for either.

[dobkeratops]

[roberto]

[nickoppen]

[dobkeratops]

[nickoppen]

Again I totally agree. You are much more up to date with all of this "modern" stuff than I am. Your point about "edging over with the classic CPU+GPU ... with real world useable software at every step" is very true. I think that you would need very deep pockets to take the leap with new hardware platform and be able to pull all of the software together to get it to work.

[jar]

Adapteva was smart to have invested in the GCC toolchain early on. The fact that Epiphany has a real compiler and doesn't require some hacked up or extended version of C to program sets it beyond 90% of other startup offerings.

Yes, the tools need developed and these take time and resources (which Adapteva didn't have). Andreas has written at length about finding the right small group of people to make the whole thing work. A small group of people can make an impact on the many but the goals must be aligned.

Parallel computing isn't going away and parallel programming will always have challeges. Finding an appropriate amount of software abstraction and flexibility remains an unsolved problem in computer science.

If I thought the story was over, I wouldn't still be here.

[aolofsson]

...feel compelled to respond.

Here's my 2 cents on free will. I chose to destroy my body and mind for 9 years with relentless 80 hour work weeks in an attempt to bring financial security to my wife and kids and to show the world a more efficient way to compute. There was not a single day during that time that Adapteva wasn't on my mind. In late 2016 I decided that Adapteva was never going to break through to the main stream and that my impact on the world was going to be marginal at best (you will never know just how close we got....) so I chose to move to DARPA where I get a safe salary, a significant research budget and the ability to affect a whole industry. It wasn't an easy decision, but definitely the right one for me and my family.

So where does that leave the community? Well, it's your choice...but before you choose to abandon the Parallella consider this:
-What is the alternative?
-All of the software is open source so you are free to choose your path
-All the boards are open source so you are free to choose your path
-There are thousands of Parallella boards for sale at Digikey (not running out for many years to come...)
-There are 20,000 Epiphany-III devices on the shelf so if the E3 fits your needs and you are brave enough and have the $ you could build your your own boards
-The Epiphany(3,4,5) IP is (and always have been) available for licensing, so if you are brave enough and have the $, you can build your own chip.

What you are not going to see is any chip development from Adapteva in the near future.

The Parallella community was by far best result of the 9 year Adapteva journey and I will be forever grateful to folks like @tnt, @dar, @coduin, @ericsson, @polas, @dimako, @nickoppen and others for incredible efforts to build open source parallel programming tools, tutorials, and libraries. If only the world would have paid more attention!

I wish everyone best of luck on their chosen path!

Andreas