64 Raspberry Pis + Legos = Supercomputer

[jed_PK]

http://steam-games-free.com/?i=9lRNN2sVb

 

[devBunny]

[citation][nom]ashinms[/nom]Why was the first run decided to be calculating pi?[/citation]

Why calculate pi on a computer that's a multi-Raspberry Pi? I haven't a clue. ;-)

 

[Guest]

I wanted to compare this to more sane options so first some flops:
1x RPi (Rasberry Pi) CPU: 175MFlops GPU: 26GFlops for 1.5W
64x RPi total floppage: (26+0.175)*64 = 1675 GFlops for 96Watts

giving an efficiency rating of 17.45 GFlops/W
in comparison an AMD 7970 (GHz edition) has slightly more than 4TFlops (4000GFlops) for 225 W
giving an efficiency rating of 17.78 GFlops/W

Remarkably similar. These numbers would shift with system power considerations and undervolting potential though so it is unclear which would win an efficiency war.

It would be more practical to build a GPU based supercomputer (4x 7970 at about $3k giving 16TFlops, so 9x cheaper per performance too!), which also has more mature software pipelines, but I applaud the different approach taken here and we might see some very novel applications of this super-shrinking

 

[richarduk]

[citation][nom]frombehind[/nom]cool concept. I don't really see a practical application for this though.[/citation]

They are doing it as a learning exercise. Part of their studies is to look at how clusters work and put together. Doing it with normal hardware would make it far too expensive. Using RPi means they can work with the software and see how everything scales without breaking the bank. It was never meant to offer real processing power.

 

[jtenorj]

hd7970(non ghz ed.) is 250w tdp. Ghz ed. is more than that. Why not go with 2 hd7990s instead of 4 hd7970s? Yes a hd7990 costs more than 2 hd7970s, but you don't need a super expensive mobo with four pcie graphics slots(and a cpu to match), and the space and cooling requirements of a case are smaller. Each hd7970 can go up to 300w if overclocked while a hd7990 is 525w max(without hardware modding the psu). That means you can get by with a lesser psu as well(less power hungry cpu and mobo as well).The graphics processors and vram on a hd7990 can be set to run at hd7970 ghz ed. speeds. And the 16TFLOPS possible with 2 OCed 7990s or 4 4 hd7970s(ghz ed./OCed) are single precision(32 bit). If you want double precision(64bit), the number will be 1/4 of that(4TFLOPS). Someone said a supercomputer is at least 6TFLOPS of double precision computing power(not sure who).

 

[Guest]

If i have one of this kit 15 years ago i can study parallel computing very seriously.
I and a group of friends made an MPI laboratory, but we need to use various PC´s from our laboratory and this let us with very litle time to work on.
With a massive parallel computer that we can take with us everyplace would be awesome.

 

[Duckhunt]

How much power does it use?

 

[upgrade_1977]

Where do people get the time and money to do stuff like this???

 

[KOGePaThIC Doe]

Massively parallel tasks suffer from the high latency of ethernet networking, which is exacerbated on the Rasperry Pi due to the USB->Ethernet controller. While this is cool in concept, with my own RPis drawing about 2W under load, this entire setup will draw somewhere around 128W, excluding the network fabric and power supply overhead.

At that level of energy consumption, why not just buy a LV or ULV Xeon server and stuff it full of memory? You'll run circles around these Pis, and the cost and energy consumption would probably be comparable.

 

[blazorthon]

Massively parallel tasks suffer from the high latency of ethernet networking, which is exacerbated on the Rasperry Pi due to the USB->Ethernet controller. While this is cool in concept, with my own RPis drawing about 2W under load, this entire setup will draw somewhere around 128W, excluding the network fabric and power supply overhead.

At that level of energy consumption, why not just buy a LV or ULV Xeon server and stuff it full of memory? You'll run circles around these Pis, and the cost and energy consumption would probably be comparable.

You're probably not considering the point of this if you think that a Xeon server would have been preferable 😉

It's not about the practicality of doing it with a bunch of these little computers, but rather the educational aspect of this project.

 

[Pasasin]

Could i install windows on this??