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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Cheap Supercomputers: LANL has 750-node Raspberry Pi Development Clusters [anandtech.com]

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 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 [lanl.gov] and Crossroads [lanl.gov].

Original Submission