University Team Builds Lego and Raspberry Pi Cluster

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.

Comments

Re:Supercomputer?

[Kupfernigk]

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.