Cloud Cluster

[Mepherotus]

Hi, will ever be a higher performance Raspberry? A little more CPU power will be perfect for a cluster! I'd like to build a low cost Hadoop cluster =D

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop

[nick.mccloud]

Search the forum for Bramble - the official name for a cluster of RPi's. Plenty of discussion about that when Pi's weren't around.

However be prepared for a consensus that says it will be fun to do but of no practical value.

[AndrewS]

With the one-Pi-per-customer limit still in effect, I guess the only way to build a bramble right now would be to buy up a bunch of Raspis from ebay, making it a very expensive cluster

[rurwin]

If it was more powerful, it wouldn't be as cheap.

[Morgaine]

High Performance Computing (HPC) is not the only reason for building clusters.

We have a long thread about building clusters based on Pi nodes over in the more technical Element 14 forums, here:

• Element 14: Raspberry Pi server clusters

I'm very much looking forward to this use of Raspberry Pi. Low cost is absolutely key when building clusters so Pi has a major advantage, but I have to stress the cautions that are made repeatedly in that thread (and by Eben Upton too) --- if your goal is HPC, look elsewhere.

Morgaine.

[AlArenal]

The Pi is all about getting people to learn something. Sure, you won't get into the Top 500 with a Pi cluster, but you can teach and learn about such systems without having to buy a 19" rack full of blades.

Take a given problem, solve it with code using a certain distributed environment and see how different approaches scale differently when run on 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 Pis... Analyze where's the bottleneck and work yourself around it.

That's great for running competitions, btw.

[plugwash]

Low cost is absolutely key when building clusters

Low cost per what though? the Pi has a low cost per unit but I don't think it has a low cost per anything else.

The real price of a a Pi from farnell/RS seems to be £30 (inc VAT) add in a SD card, power and network cables, port on a network switch, share of a power supply, slot in a case and it's probablly about £40 per Pi total

Meanwhile an i5 2500 costs about £160, add a motherboard, ram port on a network switch, case, etc and you will probablly be under £400 provided you don't waste money on an overly fancy motherboard or case.

In other words afaict a cheap i5 box costs less than 10 times as much as a Pi and is way more than 10 times "better".

I firmly belive that the ONLY reasonable use of a Pi cluster is to learn about clustering. For pretty much anything else you'd be better off with a smaller number of more powerful machines.

[khisanth]

i am creating a cluster with Pis purely for learning and the sheer fun!

then can apply that to more powerful hardware. Seen plenty of dirt cheap P4 and higher PCs on ebay which would be ideal