Pi-crust: A Raspberry Pi Cluster Implementation
Abstract
Raspberry Pi is revolutionizing the computing in-dustry. Originally designed to provide low cost computers to schools it quickly expanded far beyond that. With this inexpensive technology you can accomplish tasks previously unexplored. One such set up is a cluster computer to run parallel jobs. Many systems built for parallel computing jobs are either very expensive or unavailable to those outside of academia. Supercomputers are extremely expensive to own, use, power and maintain. Even though average desktop computers have come down in price the expense can still get quite high if you need a larger amount of processing power. In this project, we take ten Raspberry Pi 2 computers and connect them over an ethernet network to build a parallel version of a supercomputer. We show how one can be built inexpensively and compare the performance of our system to both desktop machines and supercomputers in use by academia. We look at a price comparison as well as performance and show the differences between the older versions of the Raspberry Pi cluster computers and our own implementation. Our results show that our Pi cluster implementation significantly outperforms previous Pi cluster projects with the cost being similar. This project strongly made us believe that the Raspberry Pi is a great learning platform for academia and personal use and the processing power at the cost involved is hard to beat.
Research Areas
