Parallella Community

What kind of daughter/expansion cards would you like to see for the Parallella?

Here are a few that have come up in discussions in the past.

-large breakout board
-samtec connector single connector breakout board
-samtec connector loopback board
-data acquisition board
-camera board
-sdr board
-audio
-secondary GigE port board
-sata board (PATA through FPGA logic, PEC_FPGA)
-adapter board to hook up to BeagleBone some of the capes? Feasible?

Andreas

I am already working on a camera board (using camera link) and I also plan to get a template made for Eagle to make it easier for others to get started.

Ideas I am working on:
1) Breakout board (epibreakout) with simple buffered multiple modular IOs and serial interfaces 0.1 inch headers (might include some ADC also)
2) Prototyping board with 0.1 pitch holes and footprints for rapid prototyping
3) Hybrid Motor control board (epiFlux) for servos,steppers etc..

Other ideas I am thinking about
1) A Realtime Xmos intefacing board - Channel interfacing and maybe slices
2) Epiphany 16 add on board - Even more number crunching!
3) Coms board with industrial standard breakouts CAN.RS485/422 etc..

regards
Al

SATA would pretty much top my wish list, right now it will be rather difficult to configure a Parallella cluster with a sensible level of disk i/o performance.

[offtopic]
@9600: iSCSI will be the workaround I'll use if SATA is not feasible.

In HPC applications you usually have local disk storage. Primary reason is of course cost, secondary reason is that it scales better. Very often the nodes work in lockstep (think MPI) and thus the traffic is very bursty. Supporting those bursts from a central storage needs very fast and expensive networking.

In the "normal" datacenter usage central storage brings a lot of benefits and the bandwith requirement is more evened out.
[/offtopic]

Hmm is there a more direct solidstate storage standard, I seem to remember folks talking about the idea as part of open compute, if so a card that could provide direct SS storage might also be a good idea for local processing.

Update : Just found how about Fusion IO, this could work with a PCIe interface?
This would need to be taken on by someone with good FPGA/NAND/PCIe understanding (not my kind of expertise) but it would be very fast and provides some good Open Comptue features.

regards
Al