ClusterCTRL Stack Helps You Power and Cool up to 5 Raspberry Pi SBC’s

ClusterCTRL Stack Raspberry Pi Cluster

Building a small cluster of Raspberry Pi boards or/and other compact single board computers requires you to handle power and cooling issues, as it may not be practical to have one power supply per board, and since boards are close to each other heat may build up. There are already off-the-shelf solutions such as rackmounts for Raspberry Pi SBCs or carrier boards for multiple Raspberry Pi Compute Modules but more often they do take not take care of all issues like mounting, power, and cooling. ClusterCTRL Stack offers a solution that can power up to 5 Raspberry Pi SBC’s via a 12V/24V power supply and control up to two fans. If you could also 3D print an enclosure for your cluster in order to attach the fan. ClusterCTRL Stack is comprised of two boards with the following key features and specifications: Controller Board Power Input – 12-24V PSU. Power Output […]

CloverPI Clusters Up to 4 Raspberry Pi Boards (Crowdfunding)

Raspberry Pi 4 Cluster

We’ve seen Raspberry Pi cluster boards before, and most of them either use Raspberry Pi Zero boards or Raspberry Pi Compute Modules. Some examples include Turing Pi Clusterboard for up to 7 RPi CM3 modules, Cluster HAT board taking up to 4 Pi Zero board, and Mininodes Raspberry Pi 3 COM Carrier Board. But some other solutions like Bitscope rely instead on full-sized Raspberry Pi 2/3/4 Model B boards. Another such option is IPTerra CloverPI board allowing up to 4 Raspberry Pi or compatible boards with 40-pin header to be clustered into a single unit powered by one power supply and connected via a 5-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. CloverPI is shown above without RPi boards. The mainboard includes four 40-pin headers, four 6-pin Ethernet headers for SBC’s, as well as one Gigabit Ethernet port, and one power jack. There’s also a board/card fitted in the middle of the latest version […]

Cluster HAT Interfaces up to 4 Raspberry Pi Zero to Raspberry Pi 2/3/4 Board

Cluster HAT

Cluster HAT is a solution to the problem of building cluster computing. Distributed computing is difficult already, and this tiny hardware kit is one answer to the problem. Although building a computer cluster is not that easy,  it is one of the most impressive Raspberry Pi projects.  Why Cluster HAT? The Cluster HAT (Hardware Attached on Top)  interfaces a (Controller) Raspberry Pi A+/B+/2/3/4 with 4 Raspberry Pi Zeros. It is configured to use USB Gadget mode. Also, it is an ideal tool for teaching, testing or simulating small scale clusters. Cluster HAT leverages the flexibility of Raspberry Pi by allowing programmers to experiment with cluster computing. It is important you know that the HAT does not come with a Raspberry Pi or Pi Zero. The two are purchased separately. Pimoroni, the manufacturer, provides assembly and control instructions on its product page. Also,  they explain 3 ways of setting up the […]

Turing Pi Clusterboard Takes up to 7 Raspberry Pi Compute Modules

Turing Pi Raspberry Pi Compute-Module 3+ Cluster Board

We’ve already covered several cluster solutions based on Raspberry Pi boards such as Bitscope Blade with up to 40 Raspberry Pi boards, a 16 Raspberry Pi Zero cluster board prototype, Circumference “datacenter-in-a-box” with up to 32 Raspberry Pi 3 B+ boards. If you want something more compact, it makes sense to develop a platform with Raspberry Pi Compute Modules instead, and we’ve already published news about MiniNodes Raspberry Pi 3 CoM Carrier Board that supports up to to 5 Compute Modules 3/3+ last year. There’s now another option with Turing Pi Clusterboard support up to 7 Compute Modules for applications leveraging Kubernetes, Docker, Jupyter Notebook, machine learning (TensorFlow/Caffe), and serverless stack. Turing Pi specifications: 7x Sockets for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3/3+ Storage – 7x microSD card slots Video Output – 1x HDMI port, MIPI DSI connector Audio – 1x 3.5mm audio jack Camera I/F – 2x MIPI CSI connectors […]

PINE64 Plans to Move their Website on a 24-node RockPro64 Cluster

24-node RockPro64 Cluster

Boards’ clusters are always fun to see, and PINE64 has shared pictures of two RockPro64 clusters with respectively 48 and 24 boards neatly packed into  partially custom enclosures. The  48-node cluster will feature a total of 288 cores, including 96 Arm Cortex-A72 cores and 188 Cortex-A53 cores, as well as 192GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Low cost development boards may be seen as toys by some, so it’s interesting to learn that PINE64 plans to move their complete website infrastructure including the main website, a community website, forums, wiki, and possibly IRC on the 24-node cluster, while it seems the 48-node cluster may be used for their build environment. The company has just completed the assembly of the clusters, and did not disclose the full technical details just yet. However, a progress report may be written in due time. Once the migration is done, and everything works as it should, it […]

96-Core NanoPi Fire3 Boards Cluster is a DIY Portable Solution to Teach or Develop Distributed Software

96-Core NanoPi Fire3 Cluster

Nick Smith has been messing around with clusters made of Arm boards for several years starting with Raspberry Pi boards, including a 5-node RPI 3 cluster, before moving to other boards like Orange Pi 2E, Pine A64+, or NanoPC-T3. His latest design is based on twelve NanoPi Fire3 boards with 8 cores each, bringing the total number of cores to 96.  The platform may not be really useful for actual HPC applications due to limited power and memory, but can still be relied upon for education and development, especially it’s easily portable. Nick also made some interesting points and discoveries. It’s pretty with shiny blinking LEDs, and what looks like proper cooling, and the cluster can deliver 60,000 MFLOPS with Linpack which places it in the top 250 faster computers in the world! That’s provided we travel back in time to year 2000 through 🙂 By today’s standard, it would […]

24 Orange Pi Zero Boards Cluster and ArmWizard’s Debian Image

ArmWizard forum member “-W.-” needed a cluster to test his firmware build and deployment solution for Orange Pi Zero boards which can deploy the firmware to multiple boards from one single board. So he procured 24 Orange Pi Zero boards, a 24-port switch, some USB hubs and debug board, as well as some other accessories, power supplies, and two wooden planks. That’s the results after assembly. So we have 4 tower of six Orange Pi Zero boards fairly neatly connected to the 24-port Ethernet switch with 30 cm Ethernet cables, and four black USB hubs for the USB to TTL debug boards. The side view below shows the boards are powered by micro USB cables connected to three different power supplies, cooling achieved via four fans,  and the power extension is hidden right underneath close to the Ethernet switch. The cluster will also be used for machine learning latter on,  […]

Hardkernel Now Offers $48 ODROID-MC1 Solo Board for Clusters

ODROID-MC1-Solo

Hardkernel launched ODROID-MC1 (My Cluster One) at the end of last year with four ODROID-XU4S boards powered by Samsung Exynos 5422 processor with Gigabit Ethernet,  metal cases, and a cooling fan. As the name implies it is designed for cluster of boards, but the company found out that one size (4 boards) does not fit all, so they are now offered ODROID-MC1 Solo with one ODROID-XU4S board and stackable case to provide more flexibility to their customers. Here’s a reminder of the specifications: SoC – Samsung Exynos 5422 quad core ARM Cortex-A15 @ 2.0GHz quad core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.4GHz with Mali-T628 MP6 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.0 / 2.0 / 1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile System Memory – 2GB LPDDR3 RAM PoP Storage – 1x micro SD slot (UHS-1  capable) Network Connectivity – 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet (via Realtek RTL8153 USB 3.0 to Ethernet bridge) USB – 1x USB 2.0 […]

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