purpose of raspberry cluster

gbdavidx

why are people making raspberry clusters? whats the point?

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ally_uk

To build a super computer on the cheap?

Asif Dasl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq5nrHz9I94

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/index.htm

DevilWAH

if you read about this you will see that it is not really a viable "supercomputer" it was created to help teach students learn about how super computers are built and work.

The processor and network are just not up for running high preformace computing, a decent desktop with a few GPU's would out preform this and be cheaper. in fact some guy calculated that to get a Pi based supercomputer in to the top 500 super computer list you would need in excess of 1.4million of them!!

In fact there are very few real world usages for a raspberry pi cluster. The hard ware is just not built for clustering so any benefits you get from linking several together are outweighed by the bottle necks of the hardware. We briefly looked at building a condor (vHTCondor - Home) cluster out of them for disease modeling at my institute, but it became very apparent that it not an viable option.

so good to play with if you want to learn things like MPI such as used in High proformance computing / supper computing. But not for serious work. As you can see from the Southampton cluster you can practice on a 64 node cluster for £2000 on a single 13amp socket, which is plausible for a home development project. Try the same with some old desktops and not only would it cost several times as much, but power usage and space would become a serious issue to. At the end of the video its talks about taking this in to schools and collages as a teaching aid, and the skills learnt can be picks up and taken directly to high end systems costing several £millions.

WafflesAndRootbeer

They do it for stupid nerd cred just like the idiots on tech enthusiast forums a few years ago who would boast that they were gonna wire their homes with commercial-grade fiber optic infrastructure, install fiber network cards (those things cost A LOT of money) in their desktops, and become interwebz kingz.