Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer [LWN.net]

Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

Posted Sep 14, 2012 23:31 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432)
In reply to: Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer by dlang
Parent article: Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

> the problem boils down to how you define the term 'supercomputer'

Here's one attempt: A machine the can run the large challenge problems of the day in a reasonable amount of time.

> they are actually far closer to each other in terms of architecture and
> how they are used

If by, "how they are used" you mean, "programmed with MPI," sure. I can program the multiple cores on my desktop with MPI too. But the architecture of a Jaguar-class system and that of this Raspberry Pi cluster are vastly different. Sure, they have processors, memory, network and I/O but so does every other computer in existence.

Think of it this way. This Raspberry Pi thing is about taking some existing components and hooking them up in an interesting way. Building HPC systems is about designing a SYSTEM from the ground up, tailored to meet the most demanding computing challenges of the day.

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Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

Posted Sep 14, 2012 23:42 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

umm, many supercomputers were built by taking existing components and hooking them up in much the same way that this thing was. special hardware is optional, not an inherent requirement.

if a system is only a supercomputer if it can handle the most demanding challenges of the day, is something 1/10 the power of the most powerful device still a supercomputer?, what about 1/100 the power?

note that the "top 500 supercomputer" list has the top entry with a rating of 16324 and the bottom entry with a rating of 60. how can a machine so weak still be considered a "supercomputer" according to your criteria

the Raspberry Pi thing being discussed here is a cluster of machines, not a single machine. It has separate memory, storage, network, etc for each node. This is a vastly different environment to work with than a desktop system.

No, this cluster isn't going to do any groundbreaking research or solve any "large challenge" problems. But as something to teach people about supercomputers and let the experiment with and learn what does and doesn't work for HPC computing, this is a much better thing to use than an equivalently priced SMP system.