There's A Cluster of 750 Raspberry Pi's at Los Alamos National Lab (insidehpc.com)

Slashdot reader overheardinpdx shares a video from the SC17 supercomputing conference where Bruce Tulloch from BitScope "describes a low-cost Rasberry Pi cluster that Los Alamos National Lab is using to simulate large-scale supercomputers." Slashdot reader mspohr describes them as "five rack-mount Bitscope Cluster Modules, each with 150 Raspberry Pi boards with integrated network switches." With each of the 750 chips packing four cores, it offers a 3,000-core highly parallelizable platform that emulates an ARM-based supercomputer, allowing researchers to test development code without requiring a power-hungry machine at significant cost to the taxpayer. The full 750-node cluster, running 2-3 W per processor, runs at 1000W idle, 3000W at typical and 4000W at peak (with the switches) and is substantially cheaper, if also computationally a lot slower. After development using the Pi clusters, frameworks can then be ported to the larger scale supercomputers available at Los Alamos National Lab, such as Trinity and Crossroads.
BitScope's Tulloch points out the cluster is fully integrated with the network switching infrastructure at Los Alamos National Lab, and applauds the Raspberry Bi cluster as "affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers."

Comments

Re: Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

You get effect of network latency to induce concurrency paradoxes that wouldn't happen on a shared memory system.

ObCarAnalogy: a single bus can move a lot of people, but if you're modeling highway traffic, you want to use many independent cars.

You mean 75% fewer cores, fewer connects, no RAM

[raymorris]

10 CPUs with 72 cores each is 720 cores.
750 SOCs with 4 cores each is 3,000 cores (and RAM and motherboards included).

The point is to have a massive number of cores in a large number of machines, to simulate a large number of machines, at the budget point. Your idea would have 75% fewer cores.

> shared memory

Yep, that's another problem with your idea. It would no longer be an accurate simulation. Well except your plan doesn't include any RAM at all. Or motherboards, networking, etc. You're going to need to buy 750 network cards to simulate 750 machines, motherboards each capable of holding 18 cards, a number of storage devices, etc. So maybe FIVE 7290 CPUs with exotic motherboards plus RAM, network cards, storage, etc. Five 7290s would provide 360 cores, vs the 3,000 cores they got with the Pis.

Now AFTER the research yields fruit, in a couple years someone might want to put the ideas into production using fifty 72-core processors which may cost $2,000 each.

Re:No wonder pi's are hard to buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Element 14 has 80,000 in stock and ready to ship.

750 would be a small order.