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 are missing the point! The idea is not to have an super computer but to emulate one. Writing code for stuff like thus is hard and running it on the real deal is expensive. This way the can emulate 750 core system at an fraction of the cost.

Re:Obvious unimportant topic

[Zero__Kelvin]

Not really, but it does show that there are a lot more idiots like you coming here, and a lot fewer of the people who belong here. My very first thought was "Holy shit! Something that actually belongs on Slashdot on Slashdot!" If your thought was "meh" then I have no idea why you even come here.

Re: Cost

[mean pun]

You are missing the point! This way the can emulate 750 core system at an fraction of the cost.

So, what point am I missing? The Xeon phi 7290 is 4k$ and has 72 cores, you can get 10 of those and get way more speed, shared memory benefit etc...

Entirely different architecture. The point of this scale model is to have a cluster of compute nodes with TCP/IP communication between them.

Re: Cost

[serviscope_minor]

So, what point am I missing? The Xeon phi 7290 is 4k$ and has 72 cores, you can get 10 of those and get way more speed, shared memory benefit etc...

The shared memory is a detrator not a benefit if you're trying to have something which emulates an expensive distributed architeture. The point isn't to get lots of speed, it's to get a bunch of cores distributed over a local network in order to get a cheap test bed emulation of a much larger machine.