<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"></head><body><div><br></div> <br>Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@drogon.net> wrote:<br>On Tue, 5 Nov 2013, Paul Sutton wrote:<br><br>> Hi<br>><br>> A while back it was suggested we try and build a raspberry pi cluster<br>> and test it by cacluating Pi. The topic seems to have gone quiet, maybe<br>> we can do this at a Pi jam, or something.<br><br>This might be a fun project to do - but don't be under the impression that <br>you're making some sort of supercomputer here... This is purely an <br>academic excercise.<div><br></div><div>Agreed but that is what makes it exciting, because at such a low cost, and especially if a bunch of us bring our Pi's along we can create a learning environment that we hardly every get access to.</div><div>Certainly I covered parallel processing in the curriculum at college, but to date I have never practically mucked about with this stuff. <br><br>My Desktop can compute Pi faster than a small cluster of Pi's My desktop <br>takes 60 watts - that's about 15 Pi's worth of electrical power - would 15 <br>Pi's be faster? Unlikely. The program would also be more complex, although <br>the problem of solving Pi on parallel processors have been "solved", <br>trying to do something similar for other calculations may be somewhat more <br>complex.<br><br></div><div>For my ten penith worth I would like to suggest Bitcoin minning on a Pi` beowulf cluster. It would be excellent to think that ExeterLUG mined its first bit coin on such a device. Happy to run it on my power in my office until it makes a strike!</div><div><br>The "classic" parallel solver is for raytracing, or something like a <br>fractal where you can use a SIMD type scenario - each node gets the same <br>data, runs the same code, but is told which part of the data set to work <br>on. This works well for data sets like images, etc. but not so well for <br>things like calculating Pi - unless there is an algorithm that says: "Give <br>me digits A to B of Pi" that's efficient...<br><br>And the physical wiring will be intersting but not difficult - a single <br>24-port Ethernet switch will do, and you'll need a big number of power <br>sockets too</div><div><br>Good luck!<br><br></div><div>Win, Lose or Draw this will be great fun...</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>ATB</div><div><br></div><div>Rick</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br>Gordon<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Exeter mailing list<br>Exeter@mailman.lug.org.uk<br>https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/exeter<br> </div></body>