As a computer, the Raspberry Pi itself is hardly the equal of the average desktop or laptop, yet some buyers have been investigating its suitability for high-performance computing if only as an educational exercise. Professor Simon Cox of the University of Southampton, in partnership with fellow computational engineers and his six-year-old son, recently unveiled the first large-scale supercomputer cluster to be constructed entirely from Raspberry Pi hardware.
As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers, we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer, explains Cox. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi, starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image, and we ve now published a guide so that you can build your own supercomputer. At a cost of 2,500, the system boasts 64 nodes, 16GB of memory, 1TB of SD card storage and a Lego chassis. While its performance lags behind that of traditional supercomputers, Cox s creation provides a low-cost platform for experimenting with computing cluster technology something that normally requires a hefty server environment and software simulation. Details of the build are available at www. pcpro.co.uk/links/219id1, along with a guide to constructing a similar Pi cluster.
Title : Raspberry Pi Supercomputer
Description : As a computer, the Raspberry Pi itself is hardly the equal of the average desktop or laptop, yet some buyers have been investigating...
