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Progress on Berry Patch

Progress on Berry Patch:

In the last ten weeks we have managed to obtain thirty-two raspberry pis along with thirty-two SD cards that they will be running off of.  The SD cards have been formatted with copies of raspberry pi number 03 and then renamed appropriately, this reduced the time that it would take to make individual pis and they are also more easily added to the file sharing system.  I have also obtained a series of standoffs to put the pis together so that they will be organized more neatly; however, each pi only takes two standoff so I will need to have a base made which I have and engineering major at the school working on.   I have also decided that it would be preferable to have the pis not run off individual micro usb chargers as having thirty -two of them plugged in at once may cause a fire hazard so I have asked one of the Professors to assist me in creating a power supply for the raspberry pis.  In the mean time I have ordered some additional micro usb chargers so that the cluster could still be expanded, and I have successfully expanded the cluster to sixteen nodes.  I also noticed that when there are sixteen pis on at once they generate some hear, so it may be a good idea to look into getting some form of cooling for the cluster.  I have also obtained the necessary number of Ethernet cables that will be needed to connect all of the raspberry pis to the network.

For next term I hope that I will be able to have all of the pis powered, and make sure that they have all been properly added to the file sharing system.  Furthermore I will need to acquire a suitable stand for the pis.  Then there is the potential problem of heat buildup so again I will need to find a way to cool the pis; likely a few fans will work.IMG_20131121_130111_035IMG_20131125_172148_563

BerryPatch, news

Raspberry Pi Cluster (Berry Patch)

 

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The Idea for the project was to replace the current out of date cluster with a cheaper smaller cluster made of Raspberry Pis.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.