On 5/11/13 9:55 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <[email protected]> wrote:
> >On May 11, 2013, at 6:29 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> On 5/11/13 2:06 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> >> >> I don't think a Arduino cluster is something you would build to do >> actual >> computation. Just imagine.. All those little 18MHz CPUs with their >> 16 bit >> integer CPU just merrily spinning away. >> >> You'd do it to fool with cluster interconnect topologies, simple >> parallelism, experimenting with fault tolerance when a link >> disappears, >> and stuff like that. Particularly in an educational setting, where you >> could fairly inexpensively set up 20 or 30 people with a 15-20 node >> cluster. >> > > From educational viewpoint a cluster out of low clocked cpu's that >are slower >than the bandwidth it has, is completely wasted time and utter useless. My original Arudino cluster (arduwulf?) was to use serial interfaces, either SPI or UART (or even big banging UART). That would be nicely slow. I don't know that the speed of the CPU vs speed of interconnect is all that relevant for educational purposes. You could quite easily try different communications topologies, look at ways to propagate data across the cluster, investigate fault tolerance, etc. Maybe more of a "networking" experimental platform. > >Get something better for your money there :) Hard to beat $19/node plus the cost of some wire and maybe a USB hub to talk to them all. http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html rPi is in the same price range So, for, say, $200-300, you could give a student a platform with 8-10 nodes made from off the shelf widgets that they could do work on. At that price, you're in "expensive textbook" territory, and the student might be able to afford it. A class of 30 would only be $10k, which is down in the "discretionary" budget territory. You could write a library that provides MPI-like or sockets-like interfaces, as well. I don't know that you could get there with any sort of standard PC based scheme. I've been getting some Atom based mobos for about $90 each recently, but you still need to add a power supply. You'd probably boot off the net so you don't need a disk drive. And then there's the physical size issue. Put together a cluster of 8 mini-itx mobos and you're looking at a fairly large pile of hardware. You would, of course, be able to run vanilla Linux on them. If you're using off the shelf stuff (I.e. Not making a 8 way ATX power supply), it's probably $100/node by the time you're done, so it's now a $800-1000 cost. That's high enough to be above the "it might be fun to try" threshold. It kind of depends on the pedagogical objectives.. > _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
