Adafruit Announces New High-Performance Computing Shield!
After months of development, Adafruit Industries ushers in a new era of Arduino with the ground-breaking High Performance Computing (HPC) Shield!
The HPC Shield consists of 16 Arduino Unos connected together in a 4-dimensional “HyperCube” topology. Interprocessor communications are accomplished via high-speed hardware SPI.
Programming the HPC Shield is supported through a new version of the standard Arduino IDE that was specially developed using the open-source ParallelProcessing language.
The memory of each individual Uno is shared across the entire Shield through Adafruit’s new “Parallel Arduino Synchronous Shared Global Address Space” (PASSGAS) technology. This revolutionary technology breaks the Arduino memory barrier, and gives the HPC Shield programmer full access to a whopping 32K of combined SRAM!
Adafruit’s testing shows that a single HPC Shield can achieve an astounding throughput of 17.8MBops (millions of LED blink operations per second) using standard Arduino benchmarks. For truly mind-blowing performance, up to 128 HPC Shields can be connected in a variety of topologies via I2C.
In a prepared statement, Adafruit Founder ladyada notes that “the already modular nature of the Arduino platform made it surprisingly easy for us to bring this project together. The only real problem we had was getting the Adafruit_Hadoop library installed in the right place”.
The HPC Shield is sold as a kit, including all necessary cables. A nifty laser-cut clear acrylic case is available separately.
The Adafruit HPC Shield is now available for order directly through the Adafruit Store at a retail price of $379.95, and is scheduled to begin shipping April 1*.
*A Special Overnight shipping rate is available to anywhere in the Continental US for an additional $21.18.
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The “Parallel Arduino Synchronous Shared Global Address Space” is a real selling point.
I’ll take 41.
You know the North Korean media will report on this with earnest, sincerity, and fear. Ask The Onion.
@Brian –
Yes it is. We found inspiration during a brainstorming session over plates of corned beef & cabbage last St. Pat’s Day.
@Mike –
Great! Looking forward to them adopting it for their ICBM program!
And… Adafruit has just received an attempt to order this fictional item! Happy April Fool’s Day, everybody!