Dear Friends and Backers,

Last week we reached a MAJOR milestone. We finished shipping the bulk (97%) of the Kickstarter rewards!!

The 64-core boards are in the final stage of assembly and should ship late this week or early next week.

At this point if you signed up for a 16-core board and haven't received a shipping notification yet, then something probably needs to get fixed and you should contact support@adapteva.com.

We do hope you are enjoying your Parallella boards. We loved seeing all the nice messages on Twitter (@adapteva and @parallellaboard) over the last few weeks and really look forward to hearing more about your projects. Once you start using the board, we hope you join the Parallella community forum to let others benefit from your experiences.

Best wishes,

The Adapteva Team

Dear backers,

I am extremely happy to announce that the 64-core Parallella board is alive and well!! The 64-core and 16-core Parallella computers share the same PCB design and on paper "it should have been" a very simple bringup process. The picture you see above is a 64-core Parallella board with a socket soldered onto the board to allow for in-place testing of the 64-core Epiphany-IV chips. We powered up the board last Thursday and by Friday evening we had a program running through to completion on the Epiphany, blinking an LED for good measure. Getting the elink read path flushed out took a little longer, but by Wednesday this week we had the whole board up and running perfectly. Having debugged 4 different Epiphany chips and 6 different Epiphany based boards to date, there is definitely a familiar pattern emerging:-)

• Chip/board arrives
• Nothings works-->panic
• First "doh" moment-->signs of life, relief
• Everything seems to work-->euphoria 
• A weird behavior manifests itself-->depression
• Subtle "doh" moment and fix-->calm

We will start building and shipping the 64-core boards next week!

Despite all the delays and challenges along the way, the 64-core Parallella is still setting the standard in terms of energy efficiency. In fact, it could be argued that it's the most efficient computer in the world today! Amazing to think that none of this would have happened if YOU hadn't taken a chance on us back in 2012!

At one point during the Kickstarter campaign, life was a nightmare...now it feels more like a dream. 

On the 16-core production front, we have now shipped up to backer #2,999 and all the remaining boards have made it through assemly. We expect to get ALL of the Kickstarter boards to our shipping partner by the end of next week.

If you received your board already, PLEASE do power up your board and tell us about your experience. The Parallella project long term survival hinges on the strength of the community and we need a steady stream of feedback to make the platform better.

Sincerely,

Andreas

Dear (and patient) friends and backers,

We can FINALLY tell you with 100% confidence that we are in the final stage of producing and shipping ALL of the Kickstarter (and pre-order) Parallella boards!!

We have successfully built and shipped 1,500 Parallella boards so far and 15,000 new fabs came in on schedule at the beginning of March.

Unfortunately at that point we were stuck for weeks waiting for the last key components to arrive. (there are ~90 different parts on the board). Due to our standing start in January (see Update#47), the logistics of bringing in all of the ICs for the Parallella board turned out be a nightmare. We worked diligently with our distributors to bring in the parts as quickly as possible, but the standard lead times for out of stock parts is 12 weeks. Unfortunately despite everyone's best effort...the production line came to a halt due to two single source ICs.

All of the parts are now finally available and the Parallella production line is in full swing!

Here is the build schedule for the next few weeks:

4/4: 1,400 completed

4/11: 2,800 completed (including all 64-core boards)

4/18: 4,300 completed

4/25: 4,800 completed (All of the Kickstarter orders completed!!!)

5/8: All of the Pre-orders completed

We hope you are still excited about the Parallella project despite all the delays and that you will have a lot of fun with your board once it arrives. I use the Parallella almost every day and love it! Hopefully you will too.:-)

Sincerely,

Andreas

(Reminder: For any and all support question/issue/address-change etc, please contact support@adapteva.com)

Good news!

All 1,500 Parallella boards from this batch are through assembly at our contract manufacturer. 800 orders have passed tests and are now in the "shipping" pipeline stage with the remaining units still undergoing testing. Not surprisingly, testing has been the major bottle neck so far. Needless to say, we are now working on speeding up test times.

Many of you will be getting shipping notifications in the next couple of days!! 

As a reminder, we are still waiting for more bare PCBs to complete the build cycle of the remaining ~4,800 Parallella units.

I hope you have time to check out the ray tracing demo above from @shodruky, one of our most prolific supporters. We absolutely love that all of his work to date has been published under an open source BSD license! Check out some of the projects that he has created in the last 6 weeks (without ANY support from us!).

1.) An openGL command server that allows the Parallella to leverage a Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive "graphics accelerator".

https://github.com/shodruky-rhyammer/gl-streaming

2.) A scalable parallel Mandelbrot demo.

https://github.com/parallella/parallella-examples/tree/master/mandelbrot

3.) An open source parallel ray tracer tutorial for the Parallella. I highly recommend looking through his source code. Lots of neat tricks in there.

https://github.com/parallella/parallella-examples/tree/master/blobubska

4.) Debugged our Ubuntu desktop environment.

http://forums.parallella.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=844

The hardware was always the easy part. The real fun starts at the application level:-)

I am confident that if  >10% of our Kickstarter backers turn out to be as prolific and collaborative as @shodruky, the Parallella project is going to be an enormous long term success!!

Best wishes,

Andreas

Dear Friends and Backers:

Great news! The Parallella boards are starting to roll off the production line. So far we have 300 boards built up with more boards being built every day. The yield looks very good so far!

We do have some work left in speeding up the production line through "task optimization, pipelining and multi-threading". Sounds familiar.:-) Our goal is to reach a production rate of 500 boards per day as soon as possible.

We will be shipping a large number of boards this week and will report back by next Sunday regarding the total # of boards shipped.

Best wishes,

Andreas

PS. If there is any interest in seeing a video of the Parallella production flow, we will try to convince our contract manufacturer to let us film the process. Let us know...