
Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster - nreece
http://blog.afkham.org/2013/01/raspberry-pi-control-center.html
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lemming
See also the University of Southampton's pi-based supercomputer at:
<http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/>

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gavanwoolery
This might seem impractical, but many companies, including Facebook, are
examining "wimpy clusters" (actual term). Many ARM based devices can perform
about 1/7 as fast as an i7, and this number is getting better every day.

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jdboyd
The Raspberry Pi strikes me as a particularly ill suited platform choice for a
cluster. I'm not going to complain about using ARM, that's a fair enough
choice. But couldn't they have at least chosen an ARM that actually has
ethernet on board instead of connected by USB? There are Pogoplugs with a
faster ARM processor and built in GigE for $16 or $22 on Amazon.

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cs02rm0
The Raspberry Pi has ethernet on board.

[http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/751305...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/07/7513051848_9a6ef2feb8_o.jpeg)

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alexkus
The Raspberry Pi onboard ethernet is connected via USB.

$ dmesg | grep -i usb | grep -i ether

[ 3.058947] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0: eth0: register 'smsc95xx' at usb-
bcm2708_usb-1.1, smsc95xx USB 2.0 Ethernet, b8:27:eb:[ELIDED]

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cs02rm0
Ohhh. I see, thanks.

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Havoc
What exactly is the point of this? Surely a recent i7 or two outperforms these
by a mile for similar cash outlay?

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deelowe
It's hip. There's no real point to doing this. In terms of fixed costs and
performance per watt, x86 is better. Even if this is for education, it'd be
cheaper and easier to simply buy a single core i7 and build a virtual cluster
on the machine.

The pi's real value is in the hardware decoder, the hdmi out, the gpio pins,
and size of the device.

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jacquesm
A cluster made of raspberrypi's can be used to illustrate _all_ the pitfalls
and issues associated with larger clusters, but costs a fraction as much. As
such they are a perfect playground. How come this workload that runs in time
'x' on one pi doesn't run in time 'x/n' on n pis? That applies to any cluster,
and figuring out the answers to that and related questions (reliability,
latency and so on) is a really good application of such micro clusters.

Nobody is going to do run production jobs on a cluster like this. A virtual
cluster on a single i7 performs subtly different in many ways and will be
unable to illustrate many real world problems. So for education it's simply
not the same thing.

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graue
> _How come this workload that runs in time 'x' on one pi doesn't run in time
> 'x/n' on n pis?_

When the 16-core Parallella[1] comes out, it'll be interesting to use it to
answer the same sorts of questions.

[1]: <http://www.parallella.org/>

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cdi
Is it faster than single core on 3770k?

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derpmaster
rasberry pi is a mess of firmware they won't release full documentation for.
enjoy your enormous binary blobs

