

Putting together a Raspberry Pi Beowulf cluster - tanglesome
http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/raspberry-pi/

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jff
I'd like to first point out that the name "Beowulf cluster" is pretty silly in
general; allow me to enumerate the incredibly complicated setup procedure for
a Beowulf cluster: 1) Install Linux on a bunch of networked computers, 2)
"apt-get install mpi" on every one. That's it.

Here’s something made at a national lab about 3 years ago:
[http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3538/5702439502_b6448467b8_o.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3538/5702439502_b6448467b8_o.jpg)

I wonder if it inspired this project at all? The case, the fans, very similar
looks.

The box has 7 Gumstix “Stagecoach” motherboards, each loaded with 7 Gumstix
Overo boards for a total of 49 ARM processors in the box. There is an Ethernet
switch mounted in the bottom and a power supply at the back. They made 4 of
these and stacked them up for a total of 196 CPUs. You can check out some
action shots in this video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyn9krjIRc&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyn9krjIRc&feature=youtu.be&t=50s)

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bascule
Confirm, I don't think I've heard anyone even use the term "Beowulf cluster"
since the late '90s/early '00s

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jff
Same here, aside from Slashdot and breathless Hackaday posts where someone has
shoved 8 beagleboards into a suitcase.

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jbuttars
As a BSU Alum and someone who cobbled together a cluster while studying
parallel programming at BSU, awesome!

That's a beautiful build you have there. The custom power delivery with the
pretty lights is such a nice touch. That looks like it was a lot of fun, and
I'm sure you learned a lot.

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daniel-cussen
Or buy a GA144, with 144 incredibly tightly networked 700 MHz computers, for
$20.

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jff
"The GA144 comes in an 88-pin QFN package and the 144 nodes — each core is a
self-contained F18A Computer with 64 18-bit words each of ROM and RAM — are
arranged in an 8x18 grid. Those around the edge of the grid are equipped with
I/O ranging from asynchronous serial boot, GPIO and SPI flash, through to
high-speed SERDES and analogue I/O."

It's cool tech, but you shouldn't pretend that you'll be running the same
software or operating systems on the GA144.

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wcfields
The whole engineering server at Boise State seems to be down.

There is an 8 min video here demonstrating the system:
<http://youtu.be/i_r3z1jYHAc>

