I have a Pi Zero-based 8 node MPI cluster (4 Zeroes, 1 Pi2) that I set up using 8086 Consulting's Clusterhat. In total it gets about 454 Gigaflops, or roughly t

I have a Pi Zero-based 8 node MPI cluster (4 Zeroes, 1 Pi2) that I set up using 8086 Consulting's Clusterhat. In total it gets about 454 Gigaflops, or roughly the speed of a Pentium 4, or maybe two Raspberry Pi 2s. It's my 3rd beowulf, but the first that fits in my hand and runs over USB. I use it mostly for exploring fractal space and attempting to (but usually failing) to approximate pi. Both problems are well suited to doing something in the slow lane. We know Pi to trillions of places, so there's little benefit in a fast machine to calculate it to billions. It's more a great exercise learning problem solving approaches. So far I've managed to get a working monte-carlo based approximation across the node, but it's a terrible approach to approximating pi to anything more than a few places. I've also had some luck with implementing ramanujan-type formulae, and am still working on implementing chudnovsky in distributed forms within the bounds of the zero's RAM limitations. On the fractal side I've only really had time to look at mandelbrot, but I'm looking forward to using it to render animations for julia and to explore henon attractors. [1] - http://clusterhat.com/ http://clusterhat.com/