3 ms·

It's hip. There's no real point to doing this. In terms of fixed costs and performance per watt, x86 is better. Even if this is for education, it'd be cheaper a

by deelowe 14y ago

It's hip. There's no real point to doing this. In terms of fixed costs and performance per watt, x86 is better. Even if this is for education, it'd be cheaper and easier to simply buy a single core i7 and build a virtual cluster on the machine. The pi's real value is in the hardware decoder, the hdmi out, the gpio pins, and size of the device.

jacquesm 14y ago
A cluster made of raspberrypi's can be used to illustrate all the pitfalls and issues associated with larger clusters, but costs a fraction as much. As such they are a perfect playground. How come this workload that runs in time 'x' on one pi doesn't run in time 'x/n' on n pis? That applies to any cluster, and figuring out the answers to that and related questions (reliability, latency and so on) is a really good application of such micro clusters. Nobody is going to do run production jobs on a cluster like this. A virtual cluster on a single i7 performs subtly different in many ways and will be unable to illustrate many real world problems. So for education it's simply not the same thing.
- graue 14y ago
  > How come this workload that runs in time 'x' on one pi doesn't run in time 'x/n' on n pis? When the 16-core Parallella[1] comes out, it'll be interesting to use it to answer the same sorts of questions. [1]: http://www.parallella.org/ http://www.parallella.org/
DanBC 14y ago
Is there any use for this as a build cluster? Canonical builds 40 processor arm build cluster: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2647544 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2647544) A Lackluster hack cluster of arm machines: (http://dontstuffbeansupyournose.com/2012/03/01/a-lackluster-hack-cluster-arm-exploitation-lab-preview/ http://dontstuffbeansupyournose.com/2012/03/01/a-lackluster-...)
- deelowe 14y ago
  Sorry, yeah a build cluster makes sense. I guess would could kinda argue education too, but I'm not 100% sold on that one.

by deelowe 14y ago

jacquesm 14y ago

A cluster made of raspberrypi's can be used to illustrate all the pitfalls and issues associated with larger clusters, but costs a fraction as much. As such they are a perfect playground. How come this workload that runs in time 'x' on one pi doesn't run in time 'x/n' on n pis? That applies to any cluster, and figuring out the answers to that and related questions (reliability, latency and so on) is a really good application of such micro clusters. Nobody is going to do run production jobs on a cluster like this. A virtual cluster on a single i7 performs subtly different in many ways and will be unable to illustrate many real world problems. So for education it's simply not the same thing.

graue 14y ago
> How come this workload that runs in time 'x' on one pi doesn't run in time 'x/n' on n pis? When the 16-core Parallella[1] comes out, it'll be interesting to use it to answer the same sorts of questions. [1]: http://www.parallella.org/ http://www.parallella.org/

DanBC 14y ago

Is there any use for this as a build cluster? Canonical builds 40 processor arm build cluster: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2647544 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2647544) A Lackluster hack cluster of arm machines: (http://dontstuffbeansupyournose.com/2012/03/01/a-lackluster-hack-cluster-arm-exploitation-lab-preview/ http://dontstuffbeansupyournose.com/2012/03/01/a-lackluster-...)

deelowe 14y ago
Sorry, yeah a build cluster makes sense. I guess would could kinda argue education too, but I'm not 100% sold on that one.