I have spent the last 10 weeks building a cluster out of Raspberry Pis.

The Idea for the project was to replace the current out of date cluster with a cheaper smaller cluster made of Raspberry Pis.  For now the project was basically a proof of concept with only a few Pis to make sure that it would in fact work as desired.  The first three weeks of the project I spent mostly waiting for parts to arrive so that I could physically build the Cluster.  Once the pieces had arrived the assembly of the cluster was simple enough and getting them to be able to perform programs in parallel was easy enough because there was a guide as to how to do this from the University of South Hampton, which had previously built a cluster out of Raspberry Pis.  Here is a link to their guide on building a cluster out of Raspberry Pis.  http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/pi_supercomputer_southampton_web.pdf

Once two of the Pis were running I was able to get them to run a program that would have them compute pi.

Initially there was a problem with the network we were working on and a switch we were using to be able to network the Pis locally.  The solution came in the form of getting a different Linux machine to network them off of.  Once that was working we needed to get them to be able to use file sharing so that each Pi didn’t need its own copy of the program.  Now that that has been set up I will be able to start running parallel programs on it.