Professor Simon Cox from the University of Southampton led the team that assembled 64 Raspberry Pi $59.95 at Amazon Marketplace systems and installed them into a custom rack mount built using Lego. The mounting system was designed by Cox’s 6 year-old son James. The completed rig runs a custom variant of Debian Wheezy Linux, which has been published so you can build your own supercomputer.
The machine is known as Iridis-Pi, and is running off of a single 13 amp power socket. Each Raspberry Pi node uses MPI to communicate over Ethernet via a series of fast switches. In addition to the 64 processors you’d expect, the Iridis-Pi has 1TB of total storage. The final cost (not including the switches) was about $4,000, which isn’t bad for a massively parallel supercomputer of sorts.
Cox hopes that this sort of open system will encourage young people to embrace high-performance computing to study engineering and scientific problems. Cox has been helping his son experiment with free Python programming tools on the Iridis-Pi over the summer, which young James seems pretty enamored with.
You can start wiring together Raspberry Pi boards for a relative pittance. Each ARM-based Raspberry Pi costs just $35. It’s not going to match any of the authentic supercomputers out there, but you can’t beat the price and the experience.
Instructions on how to build your own can be found at the University of Southampton, via PhysOrg
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