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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.

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  • OK, lets construct an 8 board Pi Cluster.  On each Pi you install a 90 deg I/O port header.    Then design a interconnect board that these plug into.  The Pi's mount vertical to the horizontal interconnect board.  This board distributes  power/ground to the Pi's and also connects all the I/O ports together for what ever we want to use them for.  Such as broadcast communication.   Some I/O ports could drive  status LEDs for each board.

     

    Each Ethernet port is connected to an 8 port Ethernet switch/router for communication.  S/D cards are available from the rear and the USB's are available from the front.   The 8th board connects to a video terminal and  keyboard/mouse/printer via a USB hub.    Video and keyboard/mouse is available from each board for trouble shooting.

     

    Each Pi is separated by about 1" so the whole thing; Pi's, interconnect board, power supply and Ethernet switch fits inside a shoebox.    image

     

     

  • in reply to Former Member

    Physically, I think I'd start by designing a pluggable module enclosure for the Pi, just to make life with large N less of a bother.  A good quality rear-facing connector will have to be chosen for the module, perhaps something from the DIN41612 line.  Then N identical inner module looms can be assembled, an extremely boring operation but once done, you'll never again have to touch the wiring.

     

    I'd place the design on Thingiverse, naturally, and 3D print it on my own Shapercube if it's operational by then, or on a friend's printer if it's not.  (Or, your local hackerspace will be delighted to print it for you!)  RepRap-type 3D printing is ideal for this, since smooth surface finish is not required and you can iterate repeatedly at home and at very low cost until you have exactly what you want.

     

    It is possible that the pluggable module will have to be substantially bigger than the Pi,  because the Pi's connectors come out in all directions and the module will have to accomodate the chosen connectors within its form factor.  Which Pi connections are brought out to the rear module connector needs to be decided based on two factors, first the core signaling issues (only those connections tolerant of poor impedance matching and significant crosstalk are likely to work well through a universal connector), and second the goals of the cluster builder.

     

    A spectrum of designs is likely to emerge based on the goals for which a cluster is built.  I suspect that the most popular type of cluster module will need only power and Ethernet to be routed to each board, although of course every self-respecting geek will also require front-panel LEDs to be routed to the GPIO lines. image

     

    It should be mentioned that  we're discussing clustering Pi boards here because this is a Pi-oriented group, but the board's physical layout is poorly suited for building clusters, even for those applications where the board's capabilities are sufficient.  A better candidate for building clusters would be a board designed as a pluggable module from the start, such as Rhombus Tech's EOMA68 form factor module -- http://rhombus-tech.net/ .  Based on the very successful Allwinner A10 CPU (an ARM Cortex-A8) -- http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/ -- and with an estimated BOM cost of $15, this would obviously be easier to employ as a cluster node directly.  Unfortunately it doesn't exist yet, so its better features are quite academic. image  Keep an eye open on progress there though.

     

    For now, we'll just have to work with the Rpi's connections coming out at all angles, as no other Linux board is available in the same price bracket.  If all you need to connect is power and Ethernet, it's very easily manageable anyway.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Allwinner A10 looks like a good material to me. If i need to do something good enough which is close to the Apple TV cluster done by LMU people. And your jargons are pretty tough to catch up..maybe because you are a pro. And yeah i checked the Thingiverse 3D Open Source printer. Does it run on parallel code? I highly doubt that. I think a linear code is enough, but in which language will you code, use Robot Os? Maybe i'm taking this thing too far..i need to think about the architecture of the cluster first and then think about coding later.

     

    Kishore

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