Category: Angol’s

It seems I need 10 articles to submit for review to facebook.
If I pass the review only then can those articles be published.
Oh well maybe by the weekend I’d have those 10 articles.
Wish me luck.

After reading this
Instant Articles Now Open to All Publishers
and needing a bit of time to decompress I decided to try things out.
I went to http://instantarticles.fb.com/ and signed up and was able to activate and now try to publish an instant article all within 15-30 minutes.
Hope to help a few people out on setting this up.

Parallella is a low cost supercomputer designed by Adapteva using Xilinx Zynq-7010/7020 FPGA+2x Cortex A9 SoC combined with Adapteva Ephipany 16 or 64 cores epiphany coprocessor. The project had a successful kickstarter campaign which allowed then to provide the 16-core version for $99, and the 64-core version for $750. The board will soon be shipped to people who pledged on kickstarter, and one of the promise of the campaign was to fully open source the platform, and today, they just fulfilled that.

Before going into the details of the open source release, let’s have a look at the specs:

SoC – Xilinx Zynq7000 Series (Z-7010 or Z-7020) Dual-Core ARM Cortex A9 with 512KB L2 Shared Cache

Coprocessor – Epiphany Multicore Coprocessor. The Parallella-16 board includes the 16-core Epiphany-III processor The Parallella-64 board includes the 64-core Epiphany-IV processor

System Memory – 1024MB DDR3L

Boot Flash – 128 Mb QSPI Flash

Indicators – 2 User controlled LEDs

USB:

USB 2.0 Port(0) Connects to a host machine (PC/tablet/smartphone)

USB 2.0 Port (1) Connects peripheral devices

Ethernet – 10/100/1000M Ethernet, RJ45 with magnetics and LEDs

SD Connector – MicroSD, 3.3V

Video – Micro HDMI connector

Expansion Connectors – Four 60-pin high speed Samtec connectors for:

Epiphany link expansion connector(s)

Zynq programmable logic extension connector

Power, JTAG, debug connector

Power Source – USB or 5.0V DC

PCB Dimensions – 86.36mm x 53.34mm

Parallela Connexion Block Diagram

The 64-core version of the Parallella computer is said to deliver over 90 GFLOPS of performance, and have a processing equivalent to a 45 GHz CPU [64 CPU cores * 700MHz] providing you can run your application on the 64-core simultaneously on a tiny board consuming only 5 Watts under typical work loads. Imaging, communications, automotive, medical, and audio applications could take advantage of parallel computing at a much lower cost than is currently available with Parallella.

In order to make a platform really “open source hardware” you need to release the source code as well as the hardware file, and for the parallela platform everything seems now available on their github repository including:

Parallella board design files with bill of materials, schematics (dsn and pdf), layout files (brd), and Solidworks files.

Official u-boot for Parallella board

Official linux kernel for Parallella

Official Ubuntu distro for Parallella

Sourceware Tree for Epiphany

GCC for Epiphany

SDK scripts for Epiphany

We’ve got the hardware files, u-boot and linux for Zynq EPP, and the software running on Adapteva coprocessor. I haven’t checked the details but it looks like they fulfilled their promise. You can also access a preliminary version of Parallella Reference Manual.

You can also find more documentation on parallella.org. If you’ve missed the kickstarter campaign, and need a platform for parallel computing, the Parallela boards do not seem available right now, but you can register on their website to be informed once they are up for sale again.

via $99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware.

The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy was trying to prove a point on its blog about the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries in California by noting that there are now more of them than there are Starbucks locations in downtown San Francisco. To bolster their point, the agency’s bloggers included this handy Google Maps mashup:
Tuesday Map: The drug czar’s epic fail | FP Passport.

Bravo Mr Paul Newman! A life well lived!

The movies are not kind to older actors and yet Mr. Newman walked away from this merciless business seemingly unscathed. During his second and third acts, he kept his dignity partly by playing men who seemed to have relinquished theirs through vanity or foolishness. Some of them were holding on to decency in an indecent world; others had nearly let it slip through their fingers.
Decency seems to have come easily to Mr. Newman himself, as evidenced by his philanthropic and political endeavors, which never devolved into self-promotion. It was easy to take his intelligence for granted as well as his talent, which survived even the occasional misstep. At the end of “The Drowning Pool,” a woman wistfully tells Mr. Newman, I wish you’d stay a while. I know how she feels.
An Appraisal – An Actor Whose Baby Blues Came in Shades of Gray – An Appraisal – NYTimes.com.