Joining Pi's for emulation

[PrinceTumby]

Just to see what is possible, would it be possible to hook up multiple Pi's together and use them for emulation? Please don't tell me i'm an idiot and it's really easy or something. I'm only just a rookie geek.

[mongrol]

Instead can I tell you you're an idiot and it's very very very hard?

[DaveDriesen]

What are you planning to emulate?

You will find it very difficult to "cluster" a number of pi's together, and running an emulation would probably not be very efficient either due to the overhead involved. Speed would suffer.

That said, it's interesting to know exactly what you would be looking to emulate.

Dave Driesen
Linux dev and oldskool elite

[welshy]

Prince Tumbly
Although it seems a practical possibility, unfortunately it’s not. As with all ‘Super Computers’ the program code would have to be substantially re-written (or from scratch) to share the workload across the CPU/GPU cores, it’s called ‘parallel processing’ or ‘distributed’ computing (either between discrete computers or across a network).

Cray Inc’s ‘Titan’ is currently KING of the supercomputers with 299,008 processor cores (CPU’s: AMD Opteron and GPU’s: Nvidia Tesla) and a theoretical ‘peak’ performance of 27 petaFLOPS!

[JxPond]

In addition to rewriting the emulation code, one would have to have incredibly fast interconnections. The Pi only has USB2 and GPIO pins. Not exactly what one needs to connect multi gpus together.

Instead of worrying about emulation, why not give scratch or python a go and program a little game of your own. The Pi has quite a nice GPU.

[welshy]

JxPond
I believe Southampton University used MPI protocol via Ethernet to parallel the nodes to build their Raspberry Pi Supercomputer.

[4thdwarflord]

Yes, there are several tutorials for joining pis together using mpi, but there is probably very little software that would take advantage of the extra power.

[mrpi64]

actually, 3d things would, as the pi can only render a certain amount of polygons!