MIT builds Ubuntu ARM cluster with 96 cores and solar panels

Employees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with technology site Phoronix, have built a Linux cluster consisting of ninety-six ARM cores. The frugal Ubuntu cluster can run on solar energy.

The system was built on the MIT campus over the past weekend. To keep power requirements low, the small cluster was built with ARM cores, housed on experimental boards known as PandaBoard ES. Each PandaBoard module consists of two ARM Cortex A9 cores; the two cores come from a TI OMAP4430 soc and run at 1.0GHz. The OMAP-soc also has a 304MHz clocked PowerVR SGX540 GPU on board. That is the same as the soc that is used in Samsung’s Galaxy S II smartphone, among other things. The PandaBoard costs about one hundred and fifty euros.

A total of forty-eight PandaBoard boards were used for the cluster, complete with WiFi and Bluetooth module, USB ports, audio and network ports, and 1GB DDR2 memory on board. Power was supplied via USB ports and each PandaBoard was satisfied with about 3W idle and 5 or 6W under load. In total, the system required about 170W idle and over 200W under average load. The team did not yet provide specifications for the solar panel that provided the energy. Nor have benchmarks of the cluster been released. The system was running an OMAP4-compiled ARM version of Ubuntu 12.04 from sd cards.