Category Archives: cluster

Build Your Own Supercomputer with ESP32s

Posted on by

If the computer you have isn’t particularly fast, there’s a well-documented way to get more out of it. You just need more of the same computer, and you can run your tasks on them all at the same time. Building computer clusters is an effective way of decreasing the time it takes for computers to solve certain problems, even if the computers themselves aren’t top-of-the-line hardware. Of course, with cheap enough hardware, people will build clusters out of just about anything, including the ESP32.

For this project, [Wei Lin] admits that this isn’t really a serious attempt at building speedy …read more

Continue reading Build Your Own Supercomputer with ESP32s→

Moltoduino: Arduinos All the Way Down

Posted on by

It is getting difficult to find a desktop or laptop computer with only a single CPU. Even a typical ARM-based computer now probably has multiple cores. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from using multiple microcontrollers — like the Arduino — together. To make the process neater, [Dimitris Platis] put together Moltoduino, essentially an Arduino on a shield made to plug into another Arduino. And, yes, they will stack. You can see a video about the open source boards, below.

The key is how the board brings the pins out to connections that are easy to jumper between boards. …read more

Continue reading Moltoduino: Arduinos All the Way Down→

Firing up 750 Raspberry Pis

Posted on by

Creating Raspberry Pi clusters is a popular hacker activity. Bitscope has been commercializing these clusters for a bit now and last year they created a cluster of 750 Pis for Los Alamos National Labs. You might wonder what an institution know for supercomputers wants with a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Turns out it is tough to justify taking a real high-speed cluster down just to test software. Now developers can run small test programs with a large number of CPU cores without requiring time on the big iron.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound too hard, but hooking …read more

Continue reading Firing up 750 Raspberry Pis→

Firing up 750 Raspberry Pis

Posted on by

Creating Raspberry Pi clusters is a popular hacker activity. Bitscope has been commercializing these clusters for a bit now and last year they created a cluster of 750 Pis for Los Alamos National Labs. You might wonder what an institution know for supercomputers wants with a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Turns out it is tough to justify taking a real high-speed cluster down just to test software. Now developers can run small test programs with a large number of CPU cores without requiring time on the big iron.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound too hard, but hooking …read more

Continue reading Firing up 750 Raspberry Pis→

Imagine A Cluster Of ESP32s

Posted on by

When the ESP32 microcontroller first appeared on the market it’s a fair certainty that somewhere in a long-forgotten corner of the Internet a person said: “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things!”.

Someone had to do it, and it seems that the someone in question was [Kodera2t], who has made a mini-cluster of 4 ESP32 modules on a custom PCB. They might not be the boxed computers that would come to mind from a traditional cluster, but an ESP32 module is a little standalone computer with processing power that wouldn’t have looked too bad on your desktop only in the …read more

Continue reading Imagine A Cluster Of ESP32s→

Imagine A Cluster Of ESP32s

Posted on by

When the ESP32 microcontroller first appeared on the market it’s a fair certainty that somewhere in a long-forgotten corner of the Internet a person said: “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things!”.

Someone had to do it, and it seems that the someone in question was [Kodera2t], who has made a mini-cluster of 4 ESP32 modules on a custom PCB. They might not be the boxed computers that would come to mind from a traditional cluster, but an ESP32 module is a little standalone computer with processing power that wouldn’t have looked too bad on your desktop only in the …read more

Continue reading Imagine A Cluster Of ESP32s→

Terrible Cluster of PIs

Posted on by

When we first saw [Ajlitt’s] Hackaday.io project Terrible Cluster we thought, perhaps, he meant terrible in the sense of the third definition:

3. exciting terror, awe, or great fear; dreadful; awful. (Dictionary.com)

After looking at the subtitle, though, we realized he just meant terrible. The subtitle, by the way, is: 5 Raspberry PI Zeros. One custom USB hub. Endless disappointment.

There are four Raspberry Pi Zero boards that actually compute and one Raspberry Pi Zero W serves as a head node and network router. The total cost is about $100 and half of that is in SD cards. There’s a …read more

Continue reading Terrible Cluster of PIs→

Using the GPU from JavaScript

Posted on by

Everyone knows that writing programs that exploit the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in your computer’s video card requires special arcane tools, right? Well, thanks to [Matthew Saw], [Fazil Sapuan], and [Cheah Eugene], perhaps not. At a hackathon, they turned out a Javascript library that allows you to create “kernel” functions to execute on the GPU of the target system. There’s a demo available with a benchmark which on our machine sped up a 512×512 calculation by well over five times. You can download the library from the same page. There’s also a GitHub page.

The documentation is a bit sparse …read more

Continue reading Using the GPU from JavaScript→