SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the junior-staff-gets-the-raspberries dept.
Cheap Supercomputers: LANL has 750-node Raspberry Pi Development Clusters
One of the more esoteric announcements to come out of SuperComputing 17, an annual conference on high-performance computing, is that one of the largest US scientific institutions is investing in Raspberry Pi-based clusters to aid in development work. The Los Alamos National Laboratory's [LANL] High Performance Computing Division now has access to 750-node Raspberry Pi clusters as part of the first step towards a development program to assist in programming much larger machines.
The platform at LANL leverages a modular cluster design from BitScope Designs, with 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 3000-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 LANL, such as Trinity and Crossroads.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by leftover on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:05PM (2 children)
Just wondering why they used self-standing RPis rather than RPi Compute Modules which are made for this. They are powering 750 sets of I/O gear they will never use. Takes up more space too, although that might spread the heat dissipation.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by richtopia on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:20PM (1 child)
I suspect it is for the on board network port. Also at this scale size probably isn't an issue, as you need some air just for cooling. And the accessories that aren't used can be powered down: most low-power distributions for the Raspberry Pi have built in routines for turning off unused hardware.
I am a little surprised they did go with the Raspberry Pi instead of other hardware, there are many other options that are either faster or cheaper, and almost always with improved networking. I typically recommend Raspberry Pis to new users because of the community support, but if you are building a cluster with 150 SBCs you probably can spend a few hours dealing with a less popular board.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @08:58PM
I am a little surprised they did go with the Raspberry Pi
...as opposed to an x86-compatible architecture?
Perhaps they heard about this:
In ARM-related news, on Monday the 13th, Red Hat made available an ARM port of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
RHEL now ready for power-efficient server-grade chips [theregister.co.uk]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]