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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Creating Raspberry Pi clusters is a popular hacker activity. Bitscope has been commercializing these clusters for a bit now and last year they created a cluster of 750 Pis for Los Alamos National Labs. You might wonder what an institution know for supercomputers wants with a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Turns out it is tough to justify taking a real high-speed cluster down just to test software. Now developers can run small test programs with a large number of CPU cores without requiring time on the big iron.
[...] The system is modular with each module holding 144 active nodes, 6 spares, and a single cluster manager. This all fits in a 6U rack enclosure. Bitscope points out that you could field 1,000 nodes in 42U and the power draw — including network fabric and cooling — would be about 6 kilowatts. That sounds like a lot, but for a 1,000 node device, that's pretty economical. The cost isn't bad, either, running about $150,000 for 1,000 nodes. Sure, that's a lot too but not compared to the alternatives.
Huh. That's actually not a bad idea for sounding so silly at face value.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/01/24/firing-up-750-raspberry-pis/
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:07AM (1 child)
I've got something running right now that could parallelize very nicely, but each instance needs about 4GB of RAM. No Pi cluster for me. An AWS EC2 t2.medium would do the job, but... $0.0464 per hour per instance, I'm currently running at 1/36,000th real-time - so 36,000 parallel instances would be about $1700 per hour to get real-time output. Instead I'm running a single instance on a notebook for the past month, and I've got about 72 seconds of output which probably cost around $3 in electricity... with enough patience, an hour of output will cost ~$150 in electricity...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:10AM
Since these boards are just power supply backplanes for the RPis, as long as the Rock64 pins allow power off the expansion header you can plug four of them on the Quattro board same as an RPi, giving you a much higher memory alternative to the Pi, and at 45 dollars per pop not including shipping, they should be worth the small difference in price for people NEEDING that extra ram.
Only downside is the Mali400/450 graphics processor, but if you're running them all headless anyway, the gigabit ethernet, 4 gigabytes of lpddr3 and usb 3.0 port should all make it a much better solution for what you're using them for.