RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents, the global distributor for engineers, has signed a significant distribution agreement with Adapteva, producer of the Epiphany multicore coprocessor and developer of the popular Parallella-16 board.
The partnership will bring the Parallella board directly to customers in Europe and Asia, which comprise almost 50% of the Parallella community, and will enable quicker, easier access to this energy-efficient technology.
Parallella was introduced to the industry through a highly successful Kickstarter crowdsourcing campaign with the objective of democratising access to supercomputing. The open-source project now has thousands of users around the globe in one of the industry’s most active programming communities. The open-source single board computer includes the Epiphany III 16 core co-processor on the board alongside the Xilinx Zynq Z7000 dual core ARM processor. The credit card sized device can be used as a development platform, embedded engine, teaching platform or research tool and is easily scalable by clustering boards to create a mini-supercomputer for advanced parallel computing applications.
“As a leading electronics distributor, RS has the experience and reach to provide wider access to the Parallella board around the globe,” said Jonathan Boxall, global head of Semiconductors at RS Components. “We are energised by the initial success of Adapteva and are committed to help expand the success to a much broader range of users via our worldwide network.”
“Adapteva is changing the way that people do computing as traditional approaches are nearing the end of their power efficiency,” said Andrea Olofsson, CEO and founder of Adapteva. “Parallella puts new capabilities in the hands of the novice and the expert. We are making parallel programming an everyday, low cost, accessible technology.”
The Parallella board is available in three models and can be purchased from RS for same-day despatch from the company’s global distribution centres.
