A few of us were discussing the processing power of all the new maker kits as well as what actually defines a single board computer. We discussed how boards like the Quad core SABRE Lite board have enough power to run a tablet but are divided on what the Raspberry Pi can do from a sheer computing standpoint. Sure, it has great graphics processing capability, but how can the processing power of the Pi be increased? Being an analog guy at heart and feeling left out of what all the “cool kids” were playing with, I thought I’d take on the challenge to see how to really beef up the processing power of the Pi.
After a bit of searching on cool Pi projects, I found a video on using multiple Raspberry Pis as a supercomputer - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/
This gave a good overview of what they were doing with the Pi, so I looked further into the actual details. One of the creators had a description of how to build one from scratch -http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/pi_supercomputer_southampton.htm
He gives a good overview of mounting the wheezy raspbian image to get the Pi ready. That’s where things went downhill quickly. He jumps right into MPI, a term I have not heard of, and then throws Fortran into the mix. It appears that I now have to go back to my old college programming days using a VAX, as well as learning the latest parallel processing terms and code. I now have to span 25 years of programming to tell two Raspberry Pi’s how to share nicely? So much for trying to get by with my limited “C” knowledge. I will look into this further as I want to get up to speed. I think I'll start with the media server demo http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi/blog/2012/11/08/build-a-raspberry-pi-media-center, just to build up my confidence. If anyone actually gets this going, feel free to jump in and let me know how it goes.
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