I have a Clusterhat[1] and a Pi Zero cluster in an MPI (Beowulf) configuration. It's the 3rd beowulf cluster I've ever built, the 2nd being from recycled Power

I have a Clusterhat[1] and a Pi Zero cluster in an MPI (Beowulf) configuration. It's the 3rd beowulf cluster I've ever built, the 2nd being from recycled PowerMacs and the 1st being built with Pentium IIs. It's the most powerful Beowulf I've ever built. It's also the smallest. It fits in my hand and it runs off USB. Now you know what it is, I'll tell you about what I use it for. The first problem I used it for was to approximate 1 billion digits of Pi. I started with Monte Carlo methods, but while they scale well they're non-optimal. Eventually I managed to implement a Chudnovsky-type algorithm that worked despite the limitations of the Pi 3 head node and Pi zero nodes. Most recently I wrote code to explore the Mandelbrot set. Using some custom software I knocked up, I set a start and finish x,y,z,w and h coordinate set and it renders individual frames which are then stitched together with ffmpeg. I need to rebuild the cluster because I made some booboos with how it was set up, and there's been substantial advances in the HAT configuration. I'm thinking of doing it over christmas. What I've found works best are: * Learning about problems * Learning about scaling problems * Learning about scaling problems with solution constraints * Learning about scaling problems with solution constratints over a very long period of time. As long as you're not in a rush to finish calculations and don't mind picking something up, pecking at it and coming back later (like say, a week or so) the Pi is mostly fine. Although ISTR my final Pi approximation was in the order of minutes to run to a million digits. I know other people host sites, I just like doing basic maths problems to improve my maths and algorithms knowledge. [1] - https://clusterhat.com/ https://clusterhat.com/