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University Team Builds Lego and Raspberry Pi Cluster

Posted by Unknown on from the build-a-beowulf-wait-a-minute dept.

hypnosec writes about a neat little hack using Lego, Raspberry Pis, and Scratch to construct a "supercomputer." From the article: "A team of computational engineers over at the University of Southampton led by Professor Simon Cox have built a supercomputer using Raspberry Pi and Lego. The supercomputer is comprised of 64 processors, 1TB of storage (16GB SD cards in each of the Raspberry Pis) and can be powered on using just a single 13-amp mains socket. MPI is used for communications between the nodes through the ethernet port. The team managed to build the core of the supercomputer for under £2500. Named 'Iridis-Pi' after University of Southampton's supercomputer Iridis, the supercomputer runs software that was built using Python and Scratch. Professor Cox used the free plug-in 'Python Tools for Visual Studio' to develop code for the Raspberry Pi." Lots of pictures of the thing, and a howto on making your own.

3 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Memory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    The supercomputer comprises of 64 processors, 1TB of memory (16GB SD Cards in each of the Raspberry Pi)

    Is it too much to expect from a tech site to not call SD cards "memory"?

  2. Re:Supercomputer? by Kupfernigk · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Yes, you are missing something (though I have slight reservations about the 16 cores to a die CPUs you claim to be using). There's this thing called education...your large server running loads of VMs is not going to be nearly as useful or informative at getting the ideas across as a rig like this. There is a big difference between working with virtual networks and seeing the hardware of a real network, as well as being able to program the thing with "small" languages without monster frameworks just to make anything happen.

    However, you do win a "Miserable git" award for being unpleasant about Prof. Cox.

    --
    From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
  3. Re:Want by Sparticus789 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a bit of apples and oranges comparison there. You are comparing single-core processors to a quad-core processor. Of course the i5 is going to be faster. It would be better to divide the performance of the i5 by 4, to represent the performance of a single core of the processor.

    There's also a cost comparison. Just the i5 processor is ~$200, not to mention the motherboard, RAM, etc. Let's just say you can build a computer with an i5 for about $800 That's the same price as 32 Raspberry PIs. So if you take the MSM 7227 processing time and divide by 32, you get ~1.8 hours. Not stellar, by any means. However it is an interesting figure. There's also power requirements, cooling requirements, etc.

    Not saying that everyone should flock to SoC cluster computing, but the story is interesting nonetheless.

    And perhaps Celebrity Jeopardy was before your time.

    --
    sudo make me a sandwich