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posted by martyb on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-desserts dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:05PM

    by ledow (5567) on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:05PM (#627679) Homepage

    It's an ARM designed chip produced by an American company (Broadcom) with Singapore headquarters and made in Taiwan (at least, that's where their engineers were when they were diagnosing the early RPI USB/Ethernet/SD bus issues with me).

    That's then put onto a board with a graphics core that only operates if you have the right binary blob and for which the open-source driver is nothing more than a command shunt from OpenGL ES to internal APIs that the binary blob has, via some wrapper code.

    That then boots off a tiny on-board bootloader firmware (written by Broadcom and closed-licenced) capable of reading the kernel image etc. from the SD card and booting.

    P.S. any part of that firmware or closed-source driver has, in theory, access to every packet that goes out over Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth, Wifi or whatever else a particular model might support or have connected to it.

    In case you didn't guess from all that... you're still in the same position with RPi as you are with just about any computer ever made in the last 20 years.

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