You find it a cool idea to learn students how to drive a moped and to steer well with a moped in order to let them understand the problems of how to fly an airplane, meanwhile at home they got a car?
They will never respect you in this manner, and they are da*** right doing that. On May 11, 2013, at 7:39 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > > > 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 _______________________________________________ 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
