If you want to learn cluster computing and you didn’t have easy access, you had two choices. You could simulate a cluster computer on your laptop, or you could buy time in the cloud. There’s a third approach, build your own cluster computer system using several Raspberry Pi computers.
The Raspberry Pi, a low power, low cost, small footprint computer is ideal to illustrate cluster computing. The cluster is very easy to visualize, unlike something in the cloud, and you can easily compare the performance of a program using a single Pi to a cluster of Pis. The process of putting together a cluster computer reinforces several important computer skills, such as setting up static IP addresses, configuring Linux systems, accessing “remote” computers using Secure Shell, and writing programs for parallel processing.
I’d like to set up an informal users group, Super Pi-KC, of individuals who like the idea of building a powerful parallel-processing super computer using simple components like the Raspberry Pi. I’ve set up a planning session for November 10, 2018. The details are on meetup.com. I’m looking for two types of people, those who think it is fun to tinker around with this sort of thing, and those who want to develop resources to help others who might want to do this on their own. The low cost and simplicity of the Raspberry Pi makes it an ideal means for teaching college and high school students about cluster computing.
What would the Super Pi-KC users group do? I want to brainstorm about this, but I have a few ideas already.
Talk about some of the hardware issues (electricity consumption, heat dissipation, chaining Ethernet switches) that arise when you scale up from three Pis to a much larger number.
Show how you might solve some interesting problems using a small cluster computer. At first, I thought it might be interesting to mine bitcoins, but there are several problems with this. The bitcoin problem doesn’t scale down well to small clusters and the whole process is somewhat opaque. There are also some simple mathematical problems like estimating the first fifty digits of pi or hunting for large prime numbers. These can scale up or down easily, and the programs are fairly easy to follow. But I think the most interesting applications would involve text mining. Text mining is built on the foundation of word counts, and counting is one of the easiest algorithms to run in parallel. Thanks to Project Guttenberg, you can work on a massive amount of texts, and this work is easily divided across the individual components of a cluster.
Develop benchmarks and compare our results to earlier super computer speed records. Thanks to Moore’s Law, we can run on a hobbyist budget today, something that is more powerful than the best computers of yesterday. How many Pis would you have to cluster to equal the speed of the the 1976 Cray-1?
Compare and contrast clusters of different computers. My cluster uses the Raspberry Pi 3B, which costs about $35, but you can buy a smaller but still very powerful Raspberry Pi Zero for under ten bucks. Can you build a cluster from the Pi Zeros, and how would it compare to a cluster of Pi 3Bs? There are other small footprint, low power computers like the Banana Pi and you could even construct a cluster by recycling those obsolete laptops cluttering up your attic.
Compare and contrast different software systems for cluster computing. The granddaddy of parallel computing is MPI (Message Passing Interface), and we could compare this to more recent systems like Hadoop and Spark.
Run competitions. Several people could bring in their Pi clusters and we could put them head to head to see which one could compute the most digits of the number pi in fifteen minutes. Or we could see who could find the biggest prime number.
Build bigger and bigger pi clusters. We could try connecting several small Pi clusters together to make one big cluster. How big could we get? 20 Pis? 40 Pis? 100 Pis? Does the speed scale up linearly with the number of Pis, or would inefficiencies creep in as the cluster exceeds certain limits?
Build resources to help beginners get started in cluster computing. There’s no better way to understand how cluster computing works than to build and test your own cluster computer, and the price of the Raspberry Pi and other small computers makes it easy and affordable. There are several good books and many websites that can help you get started, but there’s always room for improvement. I’d love to work with some of the local high schools and get some of our talented youth tackling serious computing problems using supercomputers that can fit in the palm of your hand.
These are just some ideas for discussion, and I am open to any suggestions about these ideas or other ideas that you might have. Send me an email if you can’t show up for the organizational meeting on November 10, 2018.