What's interesting about this is system is that it is a good illustration that there's a lot more expense and hassle than selecting the motherboard.
While the RPI might only be $35, you also have to buy a SD card ($10-12) power supplies, cables, boxes or mounting hardware, not to mention a network switch, etc. When you are looking at rock bottom price points, small things like the cost of the plug strip you plug it all into can be a significant fraction of the total. If you're making a cluster out of $1000-2000 nodes in a rack, you can ignore things like the network cable or power cord cost, because they're in the $1-2 range, but if your computer costs $30, then a $1 network cable is a 3% increase in price. All of that might actually equal or exceed the cost of the processor. You might be better off getting a stack of inexpensive netbooks or low end PCs.. A bit of casual googling shows that there are quite a few netbooks out there in the under $100 category (odd brands, it is true) (heck, I found one place offering refurbished netbooks for $45 each.. ) Move up to the $150-200 price range and there's literally hundreds of major brand units available. Jim Lux -----Original Message----- From: beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Jörg Saßmannshausen Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:58 PM To: beowulf@beowulf.org Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Help: Raspberry Pi Cluster Hi Eric, already been done in Southampton University: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/features/raspberry_pi_supercomputer.shtml ;-) Note: that is not the cluster called Iridis (also located there) :D Jörg On Donnerstag 13 Dezember 2012 Lee Eric wrote: > Hi, > > I'm wondering if it's possible to create a small HPC by using > Raspberry Pi computers. It's only a draft idea comes to my mind. So > any issues w/ this idea? > > Thanks. > > Eric -- ************************************************************* Jörg Saßmannshausen University College London Department of Chemistry Gordon Street London WC1H 0AJ email: j.sassmannshau...@ucl.ac.uk web: http://sassy.formativ.net Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
