3 ms·
In college I did some work with an Intel iPSC/1 Personal Supercomputer that got donated to the university. It had 128 nodes, each of which was a 80286 with 512k
by chiph 13y ago
In college I did some work with an Intel iPSC/1 Personal Supercomputer that got donated to the university. It had 128 nodes, each of which was a 80286 with 512k of RAM, connected in an hypercube configuration. Being a novice, all I did with it was sort numbers. :)
But it strikes me that the Pi compute module has way more power than the iPSC did, and consumes far less electricity. Switched gigabit ethernet would likely suffice -- you wouldn't need something like InfiniBand. Not sure if you'd want an out-of-band management network for something like this, but it'd be nice to be able to monitor/restart it if the network stack gets wedged.
You'd want some sort of backplane to host the SODIMMs and route data lines. Packaging density would mean convection cooling probably wouldn't cut it, so a fan would be needed. How many could you fit into a 1U rack, hmmm?
- jacquesm 13y agoWhy go all the way to ethernet if all it does is add cost & complexity? You could simply connect the GPIO lines of one 'pi' with the neighbours! Pull out an ethernet link from each backplane maybe, but use direct communications within the backplane? > How many could you fit into a 1U rack, hmmm? Lots :)
- zokier 13y ago> You could simply connect the GPIO lines of one 'pi' with the neighbours! How fast you reckon a GPIO based bus would be? Especially if the rpis are required to do something more than just shuffle data around.
- undersuit 13y agohttp://codeandlife.com/2012/07/03/benchmarking-raspberry-pi-gpio-speed/ http://codeandlife.com/2012/07/03/benchmarking-raspberry-pi-... I was wondering this too, but I never took the time to find out what this guys numbers could translate to in terms of actual throughput.
- fhars 13y agoThese measurements are irrelevant to the question at hand, as they toggle the pins in software. If you were using them in a communication setting, you would use pins that can do serial communication using DMA, consult the processor datasheet for details. It looks like adafruit is able to push pixel data at 80Mb/s (that's Mb, not MiB) over SPI to a display: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pitft-28-inch-resistive-touchscreen-display-raspberry-pi/faq#faq-3 https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pitft-28-inch-resistive-...
- chiph 13y agoI was thinking Ethernet because the cluster topology would then be under control of software configuration. You could go either way, I guess.