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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."
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."
Did they make a Beowulf cluster of those?
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.
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.
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
That was 20 years ago. Today we don't get those kinds of performance leaps anymore.
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Not useless if you're debugging queue systems, schedulers etc.
ROFL. We're not talking about debugging the scientific number crunching code that will run on the actual cluster, but the cluster management software. The actual jobs to run may very well just be doing sleep(10000*rand()); if rand()0.1 call WriteAllTheDiskSpace; else if rand() 0.2 then call segfault_horribly(); else return SUCCESS;. etc.;, one should probably add in a few more "bad things", MPI calls etc.
Element 14 has 80,000 in stock and ready to ship.
750 would be a small order.
I don't think it is acceptable to make an understandable and relevant car analogy.
Purely out of academic interest, how fast is this thing? How does it compete with, say, a 16 core Xeon or Threadripper workstation?
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