Bramble RPi Cluster Up And Running With MPICH2!

Hey guys!

I'm the proud owner of two Pis (please don't hate me he says!), and I have spent the last day getting MPICH2 (Message Passing Interface), compiled and up and running on them. Things have gone well and the results are pretty good it seems so far. I have spent the last couple of hours writing an extensive tutorial on how to get setup

Here is the link: http://westcoastlabs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/parallel-processing-on-pi-bramble.html (It's a bit long to post here).
It also includes a .deb file with the arm compiled program, which makes things a lot quicker!

The whole thing seems to work well on old and new firmware
Credit goes to the team who built the super awesome & portable MPICH2

Cheers!

Phil

P.S. I didn't come up with the ingenious name Bramble, another user did

Nice!! Add that to my work on getting Raspis into an HA configuration for management nodes and you are starting to create a real LPC cluster. Well, you REALLY can't call it an HPC cluster, can you?

Z.

Hahaha This is true!

Niice! Just got to wait for my 2nd Pi to arrive now...

Nice!! Add that to my work on getting Raspis into an HA configuration for management nodes and you are starting to create a real LPC cluster. Well, you REALLY can't call it an HPC cluster, can you?

Z.

This was my observation too.... I see a quite complicated setup just to allow the nodes to talk to each other

Now may be I'm missing something here but if you were using this method to spread computing load around, would a 'farm' of devices all chatting via http (in SOAP fashion) not achieve the same thing, perhaps with a shared NFS store picking up any very large input data (such as program executables) and maybe an additional shared MySQL DB for coordinating output

I see a quite complicated setup just to allow the nodes to talk to each other

Yeah I think that is more my ambiguous and unnecessary explanations, as opposed to it being complicated I might make a Bash or Python script to make it a quicker process, where you just select whether this is the Master or the Slave node, and just enter all the IP addresses in.
Yeah I recommended the use of a NFS, and maybe the possibility of a Network Boot I wonder? I was advised from other sources that a MPI would be good for a small Beowulf cluster project. I'm afraid I couldn't add any useful insight into using a SOAP setup But it sounds like a good idea!
Cheers!
Phil

Hey guys, I have made a Python Script for installing and configuring MPICH2, and also another useful script which sets up RSA public/private key access between Raspberry Pis;

Installation Script
RSA Setup Script

Or for MPICH2 installation use the commands;

Code: Select all

wget https://github.com/downloads/philleonard/MPICH2-Armel-Raspberry-Pi/install.py
sudo python install.py

and for RSA;

Code: Select all

wget https://github.com/downloads/philleonard/MPICH2-Armel-Raspberry-Pi/rsa.py
python rsa.py

I apologise in advance if they are at all faulty (first Python programming I have done). It would be greatly appreciated if you could let me know of any faults!
Cheers!