Parallella Community

I'm taking a parallel computing class and I'm thinking of benchmarking the Parallela as a term project (it's a simple project, but I wanted to buy a board anyway to use in another embedded computing project next semester).

I was hoping the community on here could help me with answering a few questions before I purchased a board:

1. I have no use for the HDMI port so going with the server version saves me $50 and might worth better for the embedded computing applications I have in mind). Since I'm basically flying blind, how foolproof is the SD card? If I make the image, boot it up, and find the device on my network should I be able to SSH in without a problem? Or do I really need the HDMI for debugging?

2. This is the board I wanted to buy [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0091UDG88]. But is this the version that doesn't need a fan? The embedded application I have in mind is industrial so going fanless is always ideal.

3. If I compile a C program using POSIX multi-threading will this inherently use the extra cores? Or do I need to use OpenCL, OpenMPI or something like that?

Thanks for the input. I'd be curious to know about the UART - if everything I could see by opening a terminal would effectively be the same as having HDMI. I have no experience with it either but I would think that connecting via USB and opening up a terminal should be easy. I could be completely wrong though. I'll look around the forums.

What I gathered by reading the product spec sheets is that I should be able to parallelize a program and take advantage of the coprocessor with pthreads. I really hope that's the case because taking the OpenCL route would sort of mean that this board doesn't give much of an advantage over a GPU (other than the fact that I don't need to have a thousand threads to make it efficient).

Thanks, is UART over USB? I haven't used it but if so it sounds like I'd just be able to open up a terminal. I'm not looking for graphics - I just want to use this for some data mining-type applications.

I'll have to hunt down some SDK examples... hopefully it's close enough to pthreads so that I won't have to convert too much code over.

Thanks - I'm actually just trying to decide between the server and computer since I don't need graphics. I'm concerned that after spending $100 on the server I'll run into some roadblock, it's not working and I'll have to debug it over UART. Otherwise SSH should be fine.