Raspberry Pi + Lego = Supercomputer

Avete le pezze al culo ma necessitate di un supercomputer economico?
L’università di Southampton ha trovato la soluzione ai vostri problemi: un team di informatici dell’università britannica, diretto dal professor Simon Cox, infatti, ha realizzato un supercomputer utilizzando 64 Raspberry Pi e i mattoncini Lego per il rack.

The racking was built using Lego with a design developed by Simon and James, who has also been testing the Raspberry Pi by programming it using free computer programming software Python and Scratch over the summer. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi). Professor Cox uses the free plug-in ‘Python Tools for Visual Studio’ to develop code for the Raspberry Pi.

Professor Cox adds: “The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

The team included six year old James Cox, the son of project lead Professor Simon Cox, “who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing.”

Se volete provarci anche voi, ci sono le istruzioni in pdf

via BoingBoing