My attempt at building a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

29 Jan 2013

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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Former Member over 12 years ago

So I am a little confused on how you would actually physically use this setup once you have completed all the steps provided. Would you use one Raspberry Pi like you usually would and it would automatically use the extra processing power?

JoelQQ
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

No Joel, your software will have to be written to utilize the multiple "connected" PIs. For example, if you have 64 connected PIs (or computers), you will write your program to send different tasks to each one (typically using MPI). When each PI is finished with the assigned task, it will report the results back to the software. Hope this helps.
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

Thanks for the help Ben. Do you know of any resources relating to programing to use multiple R-Pis?
JoelQQ
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

Hi Joel,

I am definitely NOT the expert to ask. I did take a class in college on parallel compiler 20+ years ago but that was about it. However, you need to simply realize that you need to install some version of Linux, then install MPI (Message Parallel Interface) which is a widely adopted standard on how to pass messages and data between connected computers. Then you need to install your programming language of choice with support for MPI (usually via a MPI library).

There are tons of resources on how to write a parallel program. Simply google parallel programming, MPI, and your programming language of choice. I went to Amazon and search for "parallel programming" and tons of books come up. Look for titles with MPI in them. Here is one, for example, that looks promising:
http://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Programming-MPI-Peter-Pacheco/dp/1558603395/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359757538&sr=1-4&keywords=MPI+fortran

Here is a web page that gives a good intro on programming Fortran with MPI.
http://condor.cc.ku.edu/~grobe/docs/intro-MPI.shtml

Good luck,
Ben
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

Hi Joel,

I am definitely NOT the expert to ask. I did take a class in college on parallel compiler 20+ years ago but that was about it. However, you need to simply realize that you need to install some version of Linux, then install MPI (Message Parallel Interface) which is a widely adopted standard on how to pass messages and data between connected computers. Then you need to install your programming language of choice with support for MPI (usually via a MPI library).

There are tons of resources on how to write a parallel program. Simply google parallel programming, MPI, and your programming language of choice. I went to Amazon and search for "parallel programming" and tons of books come up. Look for titles with MPI in them. Here is one, for example, that looks promising:
http://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Programming-MPI-Peter-Pacheco/dp/1558603395/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359757538&sr=1-4&keywords=MPI+fortran

Here is a web page that gives a good intro on programming Fortran with MPI.
http://condor.cc.ku.edu/~grobe/docs/intro-MPI.shtml

Good luck,
Ben
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