Excellent! I've been wanting to tinker with MPI on a 5-Pi Punnet for a while, so this will come in handy :)
New guide: Bake your own Raspberry Pi Lego-crust cluster
Scientists at the University of Southampton have built a "supercomputer" from Raspberry Pis lashed together to form a colourful data-cruncher. Professor Simon Cox and his team racked up 64 credit card-sized Pis using Lego building blocks to create the parallel computer. They named their beast Iridis-Pi after the university's …
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 14:34 GMT wowfood
I always wanted to build a web server using a cluster of Pi, but turned out after reading a few things online it's less than satisfactory. Instead I'm waiting for the Ouya, sure it costs 3 x more, but it has twice the RAM, and four times the cores. I figure what I would have spent on Pis, I can grab four Ouya, and use a pair of Pi for load balancing.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 19:03 GMT Eddy Ito
"Instead I'm waiting for the Ouya..."
For a few bucks more you don't have to wait. An Odroid X carries Samsung's quad core Exynos 4412 and goes for $129. Sure the $40 shipping from Korea stings a little bit but it goes down per board when you get multiples. The ones I ordered took about two weeks to deliver, now I just need a free weekend to play with them.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 15:51 GMT Pet Peeve
Re: My Pi
Have we gotten to the point where a $35 computer can play mame games without massive frameskipping? I've been out of the mame scene for a while. Years ago, I built my own arcade control box (with movable buttons and joysticks) that plugged into a computer (hacked keyboard). it would be cool as hell if I could put the whole computer in there too!
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Thursday 13th September 2012 00:03 GMT pPPPP
Re: My Pi
Apparently it will do some of the older mame games, but then again, you need a lot of beef to play the latest ones. The point of the mame project is accurate emulation rather than playability after all.
I got mine a few days after ordering from Farnell. Got it last week and it's now running OpenVPN through my router, so I can get into my home network when I'm out and about. It's got a 32GB flash card in it, which is plenty, and I can also wake up my other computers using WOL. Just need to get rsync up and running.
I was hoping to connect an old web cam to it but it draws too much current. Might try a powered hub but I expect a more modern web cam would make more sense.
I've always used Slackware and it seems to work fine on the Pi.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 15:32 GMT Pet Peeve
I don't think there's a reg has a supercomputer benchmark yet (I'm thinking a good measure of FLOPS is the "facebook IPO"), but 72 teraflops would have qualified as a supercomputer as recently as 2007 or so (the Cray XT4 was about this fast). It's certainly nothing special now in terms of performance - a modern xeon workstation would be a couple of orders of magnitude faster at least - Moore's law does horrible things to 5 year old technology.
Still, really cool, and the lego processor rack is nifty.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 16:24 GMT Pet Peeve
Well, crap!
Yeah, I made all sorts of mistakes here. I thought the 72TF number was the measured speed of the pi cluster.No speed number is given, as you say, that's the speed of their locally-built supercomputer.
And then I got giga and tera reversed in my head when I was trying to fit the speed on the top500 list, and divided the speed by a thousand, oops! 72TF would be about 415th on the top500 list, and about 3 orders of magnitude faster than a modern xeon workstation. Never mind!
The only reason I'm not withdrawing the original message is that I think "facebook IPO" as a measure of FLOPS is still pretty finny.
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Wednesday 12th September 2012 15:32 GMT David 14
Great.. .but better ways to do the power...
I love this implementation, and the link to the UNI blog was a fantastic step-by-step on the IT install, and even some good pics to use as a Lego guide... :)
One thing I will say, is that for a group of techies, they really didn't get creative with the power supplies! That many power strips and each RPi getting it's own mains-connected adapter?
One fo the great RPi features is the simple, 5v DC power input... any old 5v will work when pinned properly to a proper USB cable... so I would believe that a single DC adapter capable of providing sufficient amperage at 5v would work fine...
The RPi, I believe, will demand up to 500mA... if that is the case, they would need to be able to provide 32A of 5v power... something that should be able to be done with at least just a few old PC power supplies, or even just 2 enterprise grade server power supplies from old servers... very little involved in splicing in the required octopus of cables needed for the multiple drops... but would be more efficient, for sure, and much less complex.
Cheers!