How would you go about clustering these things together anyway?
Well, when I first read about Rasperberry PI, before the Beta version with ethernet, I mailed Eben and got his ansewer:
Eben Upton
Jul 22
to me
Hi Rui
Thanks for your mail. The devices should be available to the general
public later in the year; I'll add you to our mailing list, and will
keep you posted as we get closer to launch.
We have some thoughts about non-Ethernet point-to-point links using
MIPI CSI-2 and DSI, but this is some way down the line.
Cheers
Eben Upton
Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Rui wrote:
> Hi
> Since Slashdot published an article about your project, I've been thinking
> about it a lot and very tempted to get my hands in some of them.
> In your site you ask what would i do with it, and my answer is I'd love to
> make a very cheap and low power cluster out of it, running Xen, perhaps.
> But then, I realized something:
> Is there any other way to make each one communicate with each other?
> As far I've understood, it has to be via an usb-ethernet adapter, right?
> How costly would it be to implement some kind of bus so we could stack them
> together and even, power them all at the same time?
> Perhaps some pins on the side that would connect in some sort of breadboard?
> How about leaving some expanding capabilities open for, let's say,
> peripherals connecting directly to this bus for robotics or other purposes?
> Bear in mind that these are just some of my thoughts about it and i think
> that leaving room for parallel processing will attract lots of people, but I
> understand it might be too difficult to implement and I even believe you
> have thought about it already.
> If you need some more thoughts or ideas about this, don't hesitate
> contacting me.
> By the way, I'd like to ask you a favor of notifying me about the release of
> this way cool computer, please.
> Perhaps I'll be able to buy a pair in December or something.
>
> With my best regards,
>
> Rui
But it evolved, so, with or without ethernet itś fairly simple to make the board communicate with each other (usb wifi, usb ethernet, etc...).
So you would stack up a bunch of them, nominate one as the master and all the rest would be running as slaves.
Then, you fire up each board's OS, run XEN and start adding them up to the master.
You would end up with a virtualized computer where you would put any OS you could (don't know yet if it would support normal x86 code that way). But even so, there could be a distributed ARM miner to take advantage of this, I gess... Or let XEN take care of distribution and load balancing, alone.
