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FF4m3
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FF4m3

Anon

Supercomputer Built From Raspberry Pis & Lego


Iridis-Pi
Engineers Built a Supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pi Computers and Lego:

Computational Engineers at the University of Southampton have built a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pi computers and Lego.

The team, led by Professor Simon Cox, consisted of Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O'Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment, along with Professor Cox's son James Cox (aged 6) who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing.

Professor Cox comments: "As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer."

If you want to build a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer yourself see: »www.soton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi


EUS
Kill cancer
Premium Member
join:2002-09-10
canada

EUS

Premium Member

That's great!
OZO
Premium Member
join:2003-01-17

OZO to FF4m3

Premium Member

to FF4m3
And of course Professor Simon Cox is sitting right behind his creation...

FF4m3
@bhn.net

FF4m3 to FF4m3

Anon

to FF4m3
This is so way cool!
said by FF4m3 :

If you want to build a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer yourself see: »www.soton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi

More pics here and on the pdf. At a glance the instructions look user friendly and detailed.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

It is cool, and kudos to the guy and his kid, but calling that a "supercomputer" is a bit of a stretch.

Santa Fe
BUT.....I Digress!

join:2000-08-22
Freight Yard

Santa Fe

said by Wily_One:

It is cool, and kudos to the guy and his kid, but calling that a "supercomputer" is a bit of a stretch.

I guess if you're comparing it to a Timex Sinclair 1000, it would be!
Kearnstd
Space Elf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ

Kearnstd to Wily_One

Premium Member

to Wily_One
yea I am guessing it could still be beat out by a computer built for the same cost using a conventional CPU.

That said it is cool, Other than cost I am guessing they used those devices because it makes software easy. Every single one of them is exactly the same so the same image can be just copied to every flash drive.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

said by Kearnstd:

yea I am guessing it could still be beat out by a computer built for the same cost using a conventional CPU.

Yes and even that would not be a supercomputer. When it has tens of thousands of cores and can produce TFlops or higher, then the nomenclature applies.
Kearnstd
Space Elf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ

Kearnstd

Premium Member

makes one wonder how cheaply could someone build a supercomputer. Software wise open source has a person covered for running the tasks across the multiple systems. Though a gigabit network might becoming limiting between nodes.
dave
Premium Member
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio

dave

Premium Member

I'd guess that today's design problem is "processing is cheap, interconnects are expensive". But what do I know, I'm a software guy.

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

Yeah modern high performance clusters don't use ethernet. Think InfiniBand.

leibold
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Netgear CG3000DCR
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leibold to Wily_One

MVM

to Wily_One
The definition of "supercomputer" keeps changing as computers evolve and get faster.
The CDC 6600 was the first to reach 1 MegaFLOPS and therefore considered a supercomputer at the time. Even a single Raspberry Pi exceeds that floating point processing capability by several magnitudes.
While the Raspberry Pi Supercomputer won't make it into the Top-500 list, the name of the project is nevertheless appropriate. These days all supercomputers consist of interconnected compute nodes and the software used for parallel execution on the Raspberry Pi (MPI/MPICH2) was created for and used by those supercomputers.