"Supercomputer" with lego and Raspberry PI?

[Nazgarot]

This may be interesting to some of us...

Researchers at University of Southampton claims to have built a "supercomputer" from Raspberry PI mini computers and lego.

This might give some of us (me included) ideas of how to replace the existing NXT brick... It will be cheaper, and more flexible, but a lot more work...

Some links for those who wants to build a "supercomputer" for them self.

I know this is not exactly Technic, but it should be interesting to those of us who like programming as well as Lego, and that makes me believe this would be the right forum for this. If there already is a tread on this on a different forum, please feel free to close this tread.

-ED-

[roamingstop]

Well actually if TLG are clever and jump on the Raspberry bandwagon then there could be some really neat NXT V3 models - especially if considering the small OLED displays which can now be produced.

[kieran]

Yep all you really need are a few interface boards, one for sensors and one for motor control, would be very interesting to see

[drdesignz]

Calling it a supercomputer is an exaggeration. I think the correct term is cluster. It's still very cool though.

[Ralph_S]

Calling it a supercomputer is an exaggeration. I think the correct term is cluster. It's still very cool though.

64 processors with 1 TB of memory sounds pretty good to me. I think you'll find that many so-called supercomputers are clusters.

Coincidentally, I used to work at Southampton University in the aerodynamics and flight mechanics group. Some of my colleagues had a collaboration with Prof. Cox and he was a semi-regular visitor to our coffee-room in the morning. It's fun to see him like this, with his son.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Aqualize]

It is nice that they make a proof of concept. But I also think that it shouldn't be called a supercomputer, the processing power of the raspberry pie * 64 is not so impressive, it doesn't fit the supercomputer description. But being a physical small computer cluster makes it interesting. Super computers can (and today; are) computer clusters but all computer clusters are not supercomputers.

And why is the storage memory mentioned in the article? A computer cluster (used for some heavy computation) often require good processing power, good/a lot of primary memory and good interconnection between nodes. The raspberry pi has 256 MiB RAM. Meaning this cluster in total only has half the primary memory of my home computer (yes, I maxed it out when I built it). 1 TB of storage memory is not impressive, one can buy 4 TB hard drives today.

I think small footprint computers like Raspberry pi and different Arduino boards are intriguing, I haven't gotten one for myself yet though. It has brought home automation DIY easier in terms of finding good hardware.

For the next NXT (hehe) I hope TLG skips the display and buttons and make the brick smaller. "Everyone" today has smartphones, using bluetooth or WLAN they can control the NXT. I fear it will be too much to compete with the smartphones so instead they should use them to their benefit (move the user interaction there). In 2006 when the first NXT was launched there were no iPhones yet and the touch-smartphone era hadn't started, so the simple display and buttons were passable as UI. Kids growing up today with smartphones I fear will think Lego is to backwards if the "intelligent" brick's UI have physical buttons. And if TLG would do some smart touchscreen-brick, it would feel outdated pretty soon anyway. So release and maintain Apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone OS, do a small brick with battery with some more processing power and good and easy connection to sensors and motors.

Edited September 14, 2012 by Aqualize

[fred67]

As a computer professional who has worked on Cray and Convex supercomputers while employed at a supercomputing center at a university, I agree that calling this a supercomputer is an exaggeration. It's really cool, and just because it's a cluster doesn't mean it's not, but... it's just not.

It's a really cool idea, though.

[Aqualize]

I hope they present some performance benchmark of this cluster.

I tried to estimate what one could expect. It is said from RPF that the the RP in CPU performance is comparable to a Pentium II 300 MHz. These benchmarks running sha256 shows that in the 5th post:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5678

The 3rd post contains a more modern x86 CPU. Averaging at 8 times faster. It was only using one core for the test. A new high-end CPU for desktops (Intel Core i7 3770K) has higher frequency and better performance per cycle. So say that it is twice as fast as the 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo mentioned in the post. Times 4 because we want to count performance together for all 4 cores.

We end up with 8 * 2 * 4 = 64.

Remember that this is just toying with numbers but gives an indication that the Iridis-Pi can have a performance somewhat lower or somewhat higher than a fast 4-core desktop processor, not superior better performance.

Edited September 14, 2012 by Aqualize