Company turns 750 Raspberry Pis into ‘supercomputer’

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a US national security research center, has commissioned a system consisting of 750 Raspberry Pis. The system is made by BitScope.

The research center writes that this makes it possible to write software for supercomputers without the need to actually get such a system in-house, which would entail large costs. Gary Glider, director of the hpc division, reports, “It’s like having a petascale machine on hand for R&D work in software for scalable systems.” The Raspberry Pi cluster was built by BitScope, which showed the system at the Super Computing conference in the US.

On its own page, the company explains that the system uses five modules, each containing 150 Raspberry Pis with integrated network switches, six of which are backup systems. The total number of cores thus comes to three thousand, since these are Raspberry Pi 3 systems with quad cores. The consumption amounts to about 5W per system and 6kW for a thousand systems, claims BitScope.

The current pilot, involving Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of New Mexico, is a first step in a longer process. For example, it is possible to build a larger system with ten thousand Raspberry Pis after the pilot and eventually increase this number to fifty thousand. The largest system that the company built for this consisted of 40 nodes. A team from the University of Southampton previously built a cluster of 64 Raspberry Pis and Lego blocks.