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Topic: After Hours

Raspberry Pi meets Lego in supercomputer-like cluster: Photos

Summary: Six-year-old James Cox has helped his dad and other engineers at the University of Southampton to build a £2,500 supercomputer-style cluster out of 64 Linux-based Raspberry Pi PCs and Lego.

Jon Yeomans

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A team of computational engineers at the University of Southampton has built a working supercomputer-like cluster out of 64 Raspberry Pi boards.

The cluster sits on racks made of Lego, runs off a standard mains socket, and has a total memory of 1TB, derived from 16GB SD cards on each Raspberry Pi. Its total cost was £2,500.

"As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers, we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer," said Professor Simon Cox, who led the project and even enlisted the help of his six-year-old son James in the design.

The computer uses a system called MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. According to Professor Cox, the machine's first task was to calculate Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI.

Image: University of Southampton

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Topics: After Hours, Open Source

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9 comments
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  • All The Basic Architecture Of A Supercomputer ...

    ... in a package cheap enough to use as an undergrad teaching tool. It may not be Top500 material, but it could help train the programmers and engineers who will create the next 500 entrants to the Top500.
    ldo17
    Reply 5 Votes

    • Absolutely.

      And the whole point of the Pi.

      Don't you want a go of it.

      I know I do.
      Bozzer
      Reply 2 Votes

  • Hmm

    I wonder how well this would work as a rendering farm.
    slickjim
    Reply 1 Vote

  • Didn't get the PI from RS then

    They manage to source 64 fruity machines and I am still waiting for 1 to arrive?
    suckersink
    Reply 1 Vote

  • This is really cool!

    Looking forward to read how it performs in computing π as well as, perhaps, some LAPACK tests.
    This is showing how the arm technology has advanced and what it can produce when coupled with GNU/Linux and human ingenuity. However, what is the deal with 1TB of memory made from SD cards? Is it meant to be used as swap? SD cards are essentially slower than sdram, the slowest of ram. If I remember correctly, Raspberry π has 256mb of sdram. So, does this actually mean 16GB of RAM?
    eulampius
    Reply 1 Vote

    • You can get higher class memory cars, up to class 10.

      They are a little more expensive, but worth it when you are trying to use them to swap as main memory.
      Joe.Smetona
      Reply Vote

  • Greedy

    And this is why RS will be late shipping my order for 1 Pi!

    Thanks!
    Sir Benfro
    Reply Vote

    • Money talks...

      and apparently you don't have enough of it.
      gribittmep
      Reply 1 Vote

  • So I'm a little surprised here.

    They managed to spend more on the Raspberry Pi computers than the Legos. You'd figure it would have been the other way around.

    Also, what's the power draw on those things? Me thinks it would make more sense to power them off of a single high-output supply over 64 wall warts or line lumps. using a large baseplate, you could have a power supply and the racks of Pi together in a space about 40cm x 40cm, and maybe less.
    Champ_Kind
    Reply Vote
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