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Is this the first Pi supercomputer ?

mgt6910

 

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/university-builds-cheap-supercomputer-with-raspberry-pi-and-legos/

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  • in reply to mgt6910

    > Is there some confusion betwen clusters and supercomputers ?

     

    Wikipedia defines a supercomputer as:

     

    "A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

     

    The Virginia Polytechnic system was ranked #3 on the list of the world's

    top 500 supercomputers in 2003, #7 in 2004, #14 in 2005 with a rating of

    12.25 teraflops, and #280 in 2008, so there's no ambiguity there.

     

    In contrast, the Pi cluster has no FLOPS rating, no high-speed

    interconnect, and a very small ram, and is clearly not at the frontline of

    current processing capacity.   So no ambiguity there either.

     

    The benchmark that was run to calculate pi is designed to show

    the speedup from running multiple nodes in parallel, but they only

    showed it running on two nodes, and deleted the timing information.

    The RPi has been measured at about 40MFLOPS under Raspbian,

    so a two-node RPi cluster is clearly not a supercomputer.

     

    For teaching purposes, with the budget they used, they actually could

    have made an instructional cluster that also had impressive performance,

    but not with RPi's.