[Beowulf] Help: Raspberry Pi Cluster

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

What's interesting about this is system is that it is a good illustration that there's a lot more expense and hassle than selecting the motherboard.

While the RPI might only be $35, you also have to buy a SD card ($10-12) power supplies, cables, boxes or mounting hardware, not to mention a network switch, etc.  When you are looking at rock bottom price points, small things like the cost of the plug strip you plug it all into can be a significant fraction of the total.  If you're making a cluster out of $1000-2000 nodes in a rack, you can ignore things like the network cable or power cord cost, because they're in the $1-2 range, but if your computer costs $30, then a $1 network cable is a 3% increase in price.

All of that might actually equal or exceed the cost of the processor.

You might be better off getting a stack of inexpensive netbooks or low end PCs.. A bit of casual googling shows that there are quite a few netbooks out there in the under $100 category (odd brands, it is true) (heck, I found one place offering refurbished netbooks for $45 each.. )  Move up to the $150-200 price range and there's literally hundreds of major brand units available.

Jim Lux

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Jörg Saßmannshausen
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:58 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Help: Raspberry Pi Cluster

Hi Eric,

already been done in Southampton University:

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/features/raspberry_pi_supercomputer.shtml

;-)

Note: that is not the cluster called Iridis (also located there) :D

Jörg


On Donnerstag 13 Dezember 2012 Lee Eric wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering if it's possible to create a small HPC by using 
> Raspberry Pi computers. It's only a draft idea comes to my mind. So 
> any issues w/ this idea?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Eric


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University College London
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