Post : 64 Rasberry Pis turned into a supercomputer
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/09/12/64-rasberry-pis-turned-into-a-supercomputer/
Posted : September 12, 2012 at 9:01 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Tags : raspberry pi, supercomputer
Categories : Raspberry Pi

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/superpi.jpg

In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before someone turned a bunch of Raspberry Pis into a supercomputer (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/features/raspberry_pi_supercomputer.shtml) .

The Raspi supercomputer is the result of a project headed up by University of Southampton professor [Simon Cox]. Included in the team are a gaggle of grad students and [Simon]'s 6-year-old son who graciously provided the material, design, and logistics for the custom LEGO case.

The Iridris-Pi supercomputer, as the team calls their creation, consists of 64 Raspberry Pis, all configured for parallel processing using a lightweight version of MPI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface) . [Simon] was kind enough to put up an excellent guide (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/pi_supercomputer_southampton.htm) for turning two (or more) Raspberry Pis into a supercomputer.

The machine has a full 1 TB of disk space provided by a 16 GB SD card in each node. Although the press release doesn't go over the computational capabilities of the Iridris-Pi, the entire system can be powered from a single 13 A supply.

If you're wondering what it would take to get a Raspberry Pi supercomputer into the TOP500 list of supercomputers (http://top500.org/) , a bit of back-of-the-envelope computation given the Raspi's performance (http://elinux.org/RPi_Performance) and the fact the 500th fastest computer can crank out about 60 TeraFLOPS/s, we'll estimate about 1.4 Million Raspis would be needed. At least it's a start.

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