Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 96 replies
  • Subscribers 682 subscribers
  • Views 12111 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Raspberry Pi server clusters

morgaine

One of my current intentions is to play with server clustering once the Raspberry Pi is in volume production and the 1-per-person restrictions are lifted.  I have a long-term background in parallelism and concurrency --- my doctoral research was in the topic, and I lectured on it later as well, so it's quite dear to my heart.  The very low price of the board makes this feasible with a monetary outlay far below anything else, so I'm really looking forward to an Rpi clustering project.

 

I'm sure that I'm not the only one thinking about Rpi+clustering. image  If anyone here has this kind of application in mind, or just general interest in the subject, please keep in touch and post any interesting links you may find on the topic.  Once there are millions of the boards around, this could be a very popular area. image

 

Morgaine.

Parents

  • More news in this area:

     

     

    Summary quotes:

     

    • "Each Slab CPU node consists of a Marvell quad-core 1.33-GHz Armada XP ARM chip, 2 GB of ECC RAM, a Cogent Computer Systems CSB1726 SoM, and a 30 GB solid-state drive"
    • "32 cores into a half-depth 1U server".

     

    I'm really surprised that there is so little of this kind of development going on.  It can barely be called a sector yet, few players and only background activity.  Is there even one such product on open sale from a large distributor?

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    >I'm really surprised that there is so little of this kind of development going on.

     

    I don't think the mips/$ or mips/watt work out too well yet compared to the i7.

     

    In the rpi.org front page blog of 24 July 2012,

    http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1655

     

    Pete Stevens compares the RPi to the Mac Mini for web hosting:

     

    "Is this sensible? We’ve had a few customers ask us if the Raspberry Pi would be a sensible device for hosting on as it’s very cheap and very low power. Unfortunately it’s also very slow for this kind of application and the supporting hardware is very bulky. The i7 quad core Mac Mini occupies less space than the Pi + hub + disk + PSU, uses about fives times as much electricity, costs about five times as much once you include the supporting hardware but is hundreds of times faster. So revolutionising the hosting industry isn’t going to happen with the Raspberry Pi, at least not until they build a PoE one with gigabit ethernet and more RAM."

  • in reply to Former Member

    That rpi.org quote is about the Pi though, a very old ARM machine which was never designed for CPU performance nor network throughput, nor even power efficiency for networking loads.  It can't be used as any kind of reference in the ARM server appliances field.

     

    ARM plugtops have for some time now had gigabit networking and integrated disk controllers.  There's no huge reason why the same level of ARM technology couldn't be reworked into a 1U network appliance featuring a few of these SoCs interconnected by nothing more than a gigabit switch, for only a few hundred pounds BOM cost.  And higher models based on quad-core Cortex-A9 MPcore or Cortex-A15 too.

     

    I bet there would be plenty of takers ... starting with me! image

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    the RPF is rumored to be planning to release benchmark results soon,

    showing the RPi doing quite well against more modern ARM cpus.

    Of course, comparing a single-core cpu to a multi-core is difficult.

     

    The Cortex-A15 is yet to be seen, I believe.

Reply Children
  • in reply to Former Member

    coder27 wrote:

     

    the RPF is rumored to be planning to release benchmark results soon,

    showing the RPi doing quite well against more modern ARM cpus.

    Of course, comparing a single-core cpu to a multi-core is difficult.

     

    The Cortex-A15 is yet to be seen, I believe.

    I would like to see independent benchmark results, so there's no conflict of interest.  But there's a general problem with benchmarks: how well is the benchmark going to predict any application other than the bechmark?  It's YMMV on steroids.