Why everybody wants a slice of Raspberry Pi...

[Rman Virgil]

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Facinateing overview... and the comments too, especially from the female contingent. Watch out brogrammers !

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/inno ... index.html

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[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I want to build a Beowulf cluster using those. The raw processing power would run Warzone VERY nicely, methinks.

[Rman Virgil]

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Billions of folk in the Third World economy could afford to have these pups able to run WZ. Farfetched ?

A parallel, virtual supercomputer indeed, for a few hundred bucks US. What could one do with such...

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[bendib]

I want to build a Beowulf cluster using those. The raw processing power would run Warzone VERY nicely, methinks.

I have around 20 PCs older than the great pyramids, and wanted to put those into a Beowulf array to try and get some respectable horsepower.

[effigy]

I'm curious enough, I just might order the "B" model.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I want to build a Beowulf cluster using those. The raw processing power would run Warzone VERY nicely, methinks.

I have around 20 PCs older than the great pyramids, and wanted to put those into a Beowulf array to try and get some respectable horsepower.

The electrical power vs processing power would factor into this scenario. If they are Pentium-II 700's or better with 512mb RAM (1998-era) then chances are it'll work fine. Each machine would need a new network card (10/100/1000 .. easily obtained -- probably $20 US each) and something like a 60gb hard disk. The kicker would be the Switch used to connect them together. THAT component would need to be able to handle the traffic, so you'd need a 1000/10000 variety and those are NOT cheap.

Then a flavour of Linux with the right kernel (Pentium-II does NOT support PAE, so it would need to be a specialized kernel). A lot to take into account but I think it would work fine ... and then we can get some benchmarks for Cluster Gaming with Warzone.

[NoQ]

something like a 60gb hard disk

What i experienced is that the main problem with those old harddrives is usually their speed; replacing any of those with an 80gb SATA drive on an external PCI controller seems to be giving a huge boost (as long as you're able to find a good controller, my attempt with VIA VT6420 was a horrible PITA; you can still use the old disc for /boot/, if you can't get your BIOS to boot from an external controller) Not sure how much this affects your cluster idea, i was just talking about user experience on a single machine.

[Rman Virgil]

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Not suprisingly, the Raspberry Pi has already inspired work early this year on really cheap, parallel processing, super computing (aka, Beowulf cluster).

Here's a small sampling of the main efforts for those interested in such a project of their own...

64 Rasberry Pis turned into a supercomputer

http://hackaday.com/2012/09/12/64-rasbe ... rcomputer/


West Coast Labs: Parallel Processing on the Pi (Bramble)

http://westcoastlabs.blogspot.com/2012/ ... amble.html


$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” touted in Kickstarter project | Ars Technica

http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... r-project/


Chipmaker takes to Kickstarter to become the Raspberry Pi of parallel computing

http://www.zdnet.com/chipmaker-takes-to ... 000005771/

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