[Beowulf] Help: Raspberry Pi Cluster

Eric Lee openlinuxsource at gmail.com
Fri Dec 14 08:21:49 PST 2012


On 2012/12/14 14:49, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:10:43AM +0000, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>> 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.
> For a "toy" Beowulf it might be worthwhile to wait for the Parallella Epiphany.
>
> P.S. SDK is already out, to a select audiience
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Hi all,

Thanks for the information. I would like to set up RPi cluster for some 
bioinformatics jobs like sequences alignment and sequences operations. 
And I would use OGS(Open Grid Scheduler) as DRM to manage those nodes. I 
do know that ARM processors cannot provide powerful FP computing so I'm 
guessing that would be feasible to do some sequences operations. Pls. 
point me out if I was wrong.

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

Thanks.



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