Making parallel computing easy to use has been described as “a problem as hard as any that computer science has faced”. With such big challenges ahead, we need to make sure that every programmer has access to cheap and open parallel hardware and development
tools. Unfortunately, the industry standard has to date been for hardware vendors to only provide massively parallel state of the art hardware to select individuals, research institutions, and partners. When parallel hardware eventually was available to the public, many vendors opted to require NDA to get access to data sheets, switch to proprietary drivers or impose proprietary code platforms..

To address these shortcomings and to democratize access to parallel computing, Adapteva launched the open hardware Parallella project on Kickstarter during opening day of the Open Hardware Summit in New York in 2012. Their talk will present Adapteva‘s transformation from a paranoid semiconductor start up to a truly open hardware platform company and tell the story of how the Parallella project came together over this past year.