[Beowulf] Help: Raspberry Pi Cluster

Mark Hahn hahn at mcmaster.ca
Sun Dec 16 20:30:26 PST 2012


> Thanks for the information. I would like to set up RPi cluster for some
> bioinformatics jobs like sequences alignment and sequences operations.

you really need to look at where your code is spending its time.
the seq stuff I see is quite IO-intensive, sometimes memory-intensive.

> And I would use OGS(Open Grid Scheduler) as DRM to manage those nodes. I

it hardly matters.  for non-shared clusters, full-on scheduers are massive
overkill.

> do know that ARM processors cannot provide powerful FP computing so I'm

let's be honest: they do not provide high values of any metric.
they are relatively slow in any performance metric, low memory,
normally combined with low-performance IO.  low power as well,
of course, which is their reason-for-existence.

> One more thing, I would like to know what field is proper for ARM
> processors.

uh, the field where they are being used: embedded mobile.  the point 
is that mobile implies dramatic power sensitivity.  to some degree, 
there are some datacenter-ish workloads that can use ARM effectively -
certain kinds of large-scale web-related in-memory servers.  but it's unclear
how much of that is happening yet, since there are infrastructure/packaging
issues.



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