[Beowulf] Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

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>When you are trying to educate people about cluster computing, the most
>important thing is conveying the difficulties (both performance and
>infrastructure related) working at scale -- not simply showing off that
>the thing is "faster."


Precisely this..

The Arduino might be a bit too small.. (you'd spend time fighting things
like the 1Kbyte of RAM to do anything useful in terms of routing tables,
etc.)

But the important stuff, to me, is the managing the hardware issues.
Nothing beats sitting there with 100+ cables in a big ball in front of you
to appreciate that a 1024 unit cluster is a BIG chore.


Too bad that Allied (a US distributor of Raspberry Pi) shows "zero" in
stock and 18 week delivery; I just got a few hundred bucks as a bonus
award, and was all ready to pull the trigger on 10 units..


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