Preview: A Cheap 12-Core, 30-Watt Ubuntu Cluster

[GreatEmerald]

it is! It's the ikea megasin dish drainer.

http://www.thisnext.com/item/738161A6/IKEA-MAGASIN-Dish-drainer

Also, Ikea makes nice 19" racks too!

http://wiki.eth-0.nl/index.php/LackRack

Except that Michael's one clearly states "NORPRO" right on the cover...

[gururise]

Very interesting indeed!

I'm definitely looking forward to more ARM benchmarks!

[89c51]

how are you going to connect all those together?

[popper]

"

This six-board cluster will be running an Ubuntu 12.10 ARM OMAP4 snapshot for the noticeable performance improvements it offers via the Linux 3.4 kernel and GCC 4.7. "

Michael, you really should checkout the Linaro GCC backlog now and again and use their latest version directly when you test as there's some interesting options in the backlog blueprint

https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/+milestone/backlog

34 blueprints and 0 bugs targeted

https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro

Linaro GCC 4.7-2012.06

[popper]

how are you going to connect all those together?

probably through the slow On board 10/100 Ethernet ports but he may get better thoughput with the
integrated 802.11 b/g/n chip , i don't know if it can do better real throughput than the 100Mbit Ethernet though

http://pandaboard.org/content/pandaboard-es

[MarkR]

Why? I am dubious about how useful this really is.

1. Does the 30W quoted include an ethernet switch? Presumably you'd need at least 7 ports on the switch (6 for each of the units and 1 uplink port). Or are you assuming that the devices will be connected to a professional switch, in which case, what is the pro-rata power usage for 6 ports on a normal switch (e.g. cisco or something) ? I wouldn't be surprised if it exceeds 30W.


2. A modern x86 server would have at least 16 cores capable of running 32 threads, but would use a lot more power. But I suspect the x86 would still win on most workloads, especially floating point.

Anyway, I still think it's a fun project if not a useful one.

I have a friend who once built a cluster of 5 i386 boards (in ~ 1996, when they were long obsolete) . It was cool.

[GreatEmerald]

I don't have much experience on this matter, but it makes me curious... What method do you use to allocate the workloads to all the boards? Through what protocol - SSH? How will the nodes be managed - through LinuxPMI, or will they remain individual? What programs are well-clusterable?

I'm thinking about whether I could do something similar on a smaller scale with x86_64 hardware. I'm going to upgrade my PC soon, which will leave some capable hardware behind (in essence a headless terminal - motherboard, CPU, RAM), and since I often need to do tasks that are very computing-intensive (FFmpeg video manipulation, mostly), it would be pretty awesome to utilise it.

[bobdvb]

Expensive

This kind of bugs me because BeagleBoards come out at over $100 when there is silicon available at a fraction of this price.

I can't understand why these boards need to be so expensive? Lets just take the Rasberry Pi, granted it is under 1GHz and single core, but it is $35, doubling the cores and increasing the CPU speed won't cost more than $5-10.

We need some $50 Marvell* Armada 1500 based machines to be built and if I keep seeing these expensive boards appearing I might have to do something about it myself....

* These things run cooler than the Kirkwood of the PlugComputer fame.

[SunnyDrake]

not that cheap but quite interesting...
BTW: HDMI (1.4?) with a/v data support Ethernet/IP 100Mb/s ... hmm KVM/Ethernet someone?
on other side i don't see any benefits compared to LAN except processed video output(remote Renderfarm/DVD players/stuff ).
how about a bulk of Sitara AM335x (5$) or 25$ rasberyy PI usb powered? and hdmi out.. flashdisk size