Abstract
The past few years have seen significant developments in Single Board Computer (SBC) hardware capabilities. These advances in SBCs translate directly into improvements in SBC clusters. In 2018 an individual SBC has more than four times the performance of a 64-node SBC cluster from 2013. This increase in performance has been accompanied by increases in energy efficiency (GFLOPS/W) and value for money (GFLOPS/$). We present systematic analysis of these metrics for three different SBC clusters composed of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and Odroid C2 nodes respectively. A 16-node SBC cluster can achieve up to 60GFLOPS, running at 80W. We believe that these improvements open new computational opportunities, whether this derives from a decrease in the physical volume required to provide a fixed amount of computation power for a portable cluster; or the amount of compute power that can be installed given a fixed budget in expendable compute scenarios. We also present a new SBC cluster construction form factor named Pi Stack; this has been designed to support edge compute applications rather than the educational use-cases favoured by previous methods. The improvements in SBC cluster performance and construction techniques mean that these SBC clusters are realising their potential as valuable developmental edge compute devices rather than just educational curiosities.
Highlights
Interest in Single Board Computer (SBC) clusters has been growing since the initial release of the Raspberry Pi in 2012 [1]
We present systematic analysis of these metrics for three different SBC clusters composed of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and Odroid C2 nodes respectively
Compared to early work by Gibb [7] and Papakyriakou et al [8], which showed that early SBC clusters were not a practical option because of the low compute performance offered, we show that performance improvements mean that for the first time SBC clusters have moved from being a curiosity to a potentially useful technology
Summary
Interest in SBC clusters has been growing since the initial release of the Raspberry Pi in 2012 [1]. Education remains an important use case for SBC clusters, but as the community has gained experience, a number of additional use cases have been identified, including edge computation for low-latency, cyber– physical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), and generation data centres [3]. To implement the SBC clusters analysed in this paper, we developed a new SBC cluster construction technique: the Pi Stack. This is a novel power distribution and control board, allowing for increased cluster density and improved power proportionality and control. It has been developed taking the requirements of edge compute deployments into account, to enable these SBC clusters to move from educational projects to useful compute infrastructure.
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