This seems to be a known problem with the RPi that you are more likely to experience when you overclock. Initially, I had a lot of file system corruptions when I powered down the cluster (nicely using: shutdown -h now) and attempted to start it again. In our e-mail conversation, Kiepert added that, "Perhaps the most annoying problem I had was SD-card corruption. Compute-intensive applications will need to look elsewhere, as there simply is not enough 'horse power' available to make the RPi a terribly useful choice for cluster computing." That is, if the programs being developed for the cluster are distributed in nature, but not terribly CPU intensive. Kiepert admitted, "the overall value proposition is pretty good, particularly if cluster program development is focused on distributed computing rather than parallel processing. work, but if I didn't have access to Onyx I didn't have any options. The Onyx cluster was down due to some renovations on the computer lab in which it resides. In an e-mail, Kiepert added, "This project was started because there was one week (Spring break) in which I could not use the Onyx Beowulf cluster I had been using. So, for near the price of one PC-based node, we can create a 32 node Raspberry Pi cluster!" For comparison, each node in the Onyx cluster was somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500. The cost for an RPi with an 8GB SD card is ~$45. Thus, by building my own cluster I could outfit it with anything I might need directly.įinally, RPis are cheap! The RPi platform has to be one of the cheapest ways to create a cluster of 32 nodes. If not however, you must then work with the cluster administrator to get things working. Third, having user only access to a cluster is fine if the cluster has all the necessary tools installed. First designed by Don Becker and Thomas Sterling at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1994, this design has since become one of the core supercomputer architectures. This modest, by supercomputer standards, currently has 32 nodes, each of which has a 3.1GHz Intel Xeon E3-1225 quad-core processor and 8GBs of RAM.Ī Beowulf cluster is simply a collection of inexpensive commercial off the shelf (COTS) computers networked together running Linux and parallel processing software. He was doing his doctoral research on data sharing for wireless sensor networks by simulating these networks on Boise State's Linux-powered Onyx Beowulf-cluster supercomputer. For his project Kiepert overclocked the processors to 1GHz.īy itself the Raspberry Pi is interesting, but it seems an unlikely supercomputer component. The Model B, which is what Kiepert is using, comes with 512MBs of RAM, two USB ports and a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet port. They're powered by 700MHz ARM11-processors and include a Videocore IV GPU. Raspberry Pi is a single-board Linux-powered computer. Another helpful source is the Beowulf HOWTO.Say hello to a homebrew Raspberry Pi-based supercomputer. There was lots of documentation available to help back then, and I would assume things have got easier now. I used i586/i686 machines with different linux kernels and networking hardware. When I was an Engineering undergrad (approx 15 years ago), I build a three-node system to produce ray-traced videos using a distributed version of the Persistence of Vision ray tracer. However, this isn't a great overhead if you only have a couple of nodes.Īnd yes, it should be pretty easy for an IT undergrad to do (maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 on the difficulty scale). With dissimilar hardware, you will have to put in more effort individually configuring each (type of) node. You can use the same disk image, or at least the same configuration files, on every machine. It is normally preferred to have identical machines because it makes system administration easier. The main limitation is that the specific application software and message passing interfaces you want to use all have to run on each type of machine in the cluster. Yes, it is perfectly feasible to build a Beowulf cluster from dissimilar hardware, and in fact also dissimilar software (at least, different linux kernels / distributions).
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