Hi everyone,
We have now shipped well over 10,000 Parallella boards across the globe and it has become abundandly clear that the only way we can really move parallel computing forward is by rewriting the standard development stack from scratch!
This need is much broader than the immediate need for the Epiphany to have better software support. Every expert tends to work in his/her comfort zone. Very few people can be effective as true "true full stack" developers, meaning that they can work all the way from algorithms down to assembly and driver programming. (sure there are the few like notzed and patc but they are the exception rather than the rule). Time after time, I have heard...Parallella is a great platform, if only it had a fast XXX... (FFT, BLAS, linpack, ray tracing, openCV, etc, etc).
This is why we started a "from scratch" parallel library effort called PAL in december.
https://github.com/parallella/pal
Please check the README file in the github repo for a complete description and contribution guidelines.
PAL is not designed to be an Adapteva or Epiphany specific project (what the hell do I know about SW ) It's designed to be a parallel computing community effort. With ~10,000 Parallella developers and 200 University collaborators certainly we could make an incredible difference if everyone got involved!
Until now we have kept PAL quiet (but working in the open). It now feels like we have a solid base and we are ready to ask for broader feedback and active contribution. This week we already got number of contributions from Mateusz Kacprzak, which is incredbly exciting since we never reached out directly to Mateusz! If we can get 1% of all of the developers to contribute time, we should be able to bang this out in no time. All it takes is for 100 people to contribute 1 function each!
So for the sake of the Parallella project, PLEASE help. Adapteva will continue to contribute time (and money) to the PAL project as long as we can, but it's only going to be great if we get more people involved. One function per person is all I am asking for...
Sincerely,
Andreas