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: 4, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:59AM (1 child)
...someone imagined a Beowulf cluster of these? :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:03AM
I had thought these things operated as some kind of Single System Image backplane, just extremely slow, due to the Pi I/O bus.
It turns out all they fucking are is a power/ground plane PCB with a bucking power supply on the end for connecting 4 RPis side by side on.
The Uno has i/o header access and a protoboard on the other side, but the Duo and Quattro models are just power backplanes for the units, making their costs seem far less worthwhile compared to the 'cheaper' models.
The RPi's biggest issue has been its lack of memory, so an i/o backplane, even a slow one, would make sense, while allowing the network i/o to be fully used for web hosting or whatever else. As this thing is, literally all it is good for is low bandwidth data logging from usb connected peripherals, or slow data processing where the workflow won't saturate 100 megabit per node.
I hope the switches these things come with are gigabit, or 4x100+1gbit uplink port, because otherwise they are being bandwidth constrained.
The websites 'flash' factor really was frustrating me until I unravelled what they really were and why there wasn't any SSI cluster image software for them.
(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...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by richtopia on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:24AM
There are better options than the rpi. Yes, the community is the best for the raspberry pi, but if you are building a cluster you know what you are doing.
I've promoted ODROID as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi here before. The software support is good and the hardware qualty is great. Recently the MC1 was released, which is designed for cluster applications.
https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-mc1 [ameridroid.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:33AM (5 children)
At least you know its secure and its bootup sequences aren't tainted with some special interest's wish list.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
Unless you verified yourself, you can't say 'I know...' in good faith.
There used to be some guy here who had something like 'Prove all things...' as a signature. You remember him? -discrete smile-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:24AM
Oh, so right...
Caught me making yet another assumption... that Raspberry PI is completely understood outside some corporate environment which jealously guards some of the inner code... blobs... I do not mind it being copyrighted as much as I mind being kept ignorant of its intentions and what it will do when executed.
I feel about as uncomfortable running blobs as signing legally binding documents whose author has inserted - oh what do you call those things that businesses print when they want to say one thing*, cause it looks good, but don't want to be held to it. Like an undefined pointer that leaves the door open for all sorts of trouble.
*we reserve to change anything at anytime for any reason. We are a business, you are not. Trust us - we are trustworthy. We say so. We printed a shield of trust on our document as certification of trust. If you disagree with anything we pull on you, you agree to pay our legal fees to fight you. Early termination fees will apply. This instrument is legally binding as codified into law by your congressmen.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:50AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:32AM
You can read about an open firmware http://crna.cc/b/11 [crna.cc] but it's not done yet. And if you check the commits https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/commits/master [github.com] it has been untouched for over half year.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Thursday January 25 2018, @02:05PM
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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:34AM