Goals
We set out to build a super computer. And we did! Sort of…
The primary goal of this project is to build a working beowulf cluster with the cheapest of commodity hardware: Raspberry Pis. Of course, the Raspberry Pis are not very powerful and thus, our cluster is not suitable for serious scientific computing applications. However, the ability to build a cluster for less than the price of many desktop computers allows programmers to prototype parallel algorithms to a true parallel environment before deploying them to more expensive clusters where resources may be at a greater premium.
Our secondary goal is to gain experience managing a cluster in order to better understand how to create and maintain a parallel computing environment. Between the hardware setup, the software installation and configuration, and the cluster profiling, we dug deep into the intricacies of parallel computing.
Check out our GitHub repo: github.com/pjbull/raspberry-patch.