Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Raspberry PI $2k TFLOPS HPC/GPGPU cluster

Raspberry Pi computer launch in UK
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video.
  • Unit will use a Chinese manufacturer.
  • distribution by
  • features
    • Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
    • GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
    • GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
    • 256MB RAM
    • Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
    • 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
    • HDMI socket
    • USB 2.0 socket
    • RCA video socket
    • SD card socket
    • Powered from microUSB socket
    • 3.5mm audio out jack
    • Header footprint for camera connection
    • Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm
  •  about $35
  • Run fedora OS
  • May be one can  build small  diskless/diskfull  HPC  GPGPU cluster
  • TFLOPS ~ 42*24 about $35*42=$1470  one will need a head node and 48 port ethernet switch and some ethernet cables and microUSB power cables so total cost around $2000