Parallella Community

tnt, you made some good points there, but looking through each one, I think I covered them already in my last answer to 9600.

The quick version is that sure, there will be lots of high-speed embedded applications of Parallella (your project provides a great example), but there won't be many as a percentage of Parallella users I believe, because most people will be using the board for parallel computing that exploits the Epiphany array alone. (We'll have to see what the future holds.)

Between that great majority that attaches no daughter cards at all and the ambitious bespoke projects like yours that will mostly have populations of one, there is a middle ground for those who want to attach a commercial or OSHW resource module in a plug'n'play manner with the relative user-friendliness of adding plug-in cards to a PC, but with the far superior engineering advantages of basing expansion on Ethernet.

It's a more distributed concept of how computers can be structured, more in tune with modern-day networking and with the needs of clusters to access distributed resources uniformly, and it has all the cost and engineering advantages of riding on the back of existing technology.

It's also worth pointing out that industry has already recognized these huge advantages, and that is why industrial fieldbuses are very commonly based around Ethernet as the underlying fabric linking distributed resources.

Of course the matter of connectivity isn't mainly solved by considering the need for a metal enclosure.

Pin connections have high frequency properties: why can a PCie 2d gen put so many bits over a connection as it can ? because it is designed to do so, with the help of setting up the connection pairs when the machine starts. That's complicated. And no way a traditional PCi card can just defeat a newly designed connector, possibly plus cable, either with handshake protocol, or something like a second gen SATA3.

It would be nice to have some "easy connection" like parallel SDI or something, and cheap connectors to connect moderately fast projects.

T.

I'd like to show my support for a daughter board with a 2.5" SATA HDD tray.

I wonder if there could be any feasibility for a modular bus connect.

For instance if a fast line custom line, i,e non-standard - maybe a modded e-link, could be easily equipped with $5 or $10 attachments for SATAx, DDRx, PCIex,... then perhaps you could satisfy both embedded and consumer use without major complexity / overhead.

If we could expose one long edge anywhere around the board with many fast pins on the interface connection, preferably a power of two, it shouldn't affect the form-factor much. On the driver/software side it is not too much to forward through the interface. I have no idea if that is feasible / worth doing on the hardware side of things though.