Supercomputer built from Raspberry Pis and Lego

A team of computer scientists at the University of Southampton in the UK created a supercomputer out of 64 Raspberry Pi matchbox Linux-on-a-chip computers and Lego. The team included six year old James Cox, the son of project lead Professor Simon Cox, "who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing."

Here's a PDF with instructions for making your own Raspberry Pi/Lego supercomputer.

Professor Cox comments: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.”

The racking was built using Lego with a design developed by Simon and James, who has also been testing the Raspberry Pi by programming it using free computer programming software Python and Scratch over the summer. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi). Professor Cox uses the free plug-in ‘Python Tools for Visual Studio’ to develop code for the Raspberry Pi.

Professor Cox adds: “The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

Engineers Build Supercomputer Using Raspberry Pi, Lego [Parity News]

Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer [Press release]

(Images: Simon J Cox 2012)

• [Paul Renault]

  The headline reminded me of this skit:
  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5147636284090988855

  • [Paul Renault]

    Speaking of ‘Steak and Kidney Pee”, I spotted this, just after my post:

• [MarlboroTestMonkey7]

  Raspberry content is ok, but needs more Lego

  • [Dan Huby]

    Agreed. They could at least use Technic Lego to provide some motorised cooling.

• [remainzz]

  what makes this a super computer?
  is it the fact that you have so many nodes?
  As surely all modern computers are super computers compared to past.

  • [Adam Greenfield]

    It is called a supercomputer because it is made of Lego, and clearly, this is a super way to make a computer.

• [Stephen Schenck]

  Why are they measuring everything in giga- and terabits instead of bytes?

  • [Scott Byrne]

    Because it’s easier for people to grasp the size using ‘chunks’ that people are more familiar with. 

    • [Stephen Schenck]

      What? People almost always talk about memory and flash in terms of gigabytes, not bits.

  • [Dan Huby]

    The person that wrote the press release probably just got the capitalisation wrong. We are used to talking about megabit (Mb) / gigabit (Gb) in relation to bandwidth so  confusing the two is easily done.

    • [Robert Baruch]

      The hoi-polloi doesn’t know the technical difference between b and B.

      • [OtherMichael]

         THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN B AND B

• [Rocky Hasan]

  Nice One. Reminded me of my old pc chipset and my old lego set.

• [Michael Polo]

  Neat idea, and looks great. Would be interested in seeing benchmarks against a virtual equivalent machine though

• [Kayin McLeod]

  Oh, is this why I haven’t received mine yet.

• [naught_for_naught]

  Nice.

• [michael b]

  64  of them?  I had a hard time getting just one.

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    Right? 3 months from registration to delivery for me.  For one.

    Love mine, best £25 media center a person could want.  But how in the hell did they get 64 of them?  That said the Pi was built for educational purposes in mind, so maybe the uni got a little preference…

• [brainflakes]

  Depending on what you want to compute this isn’t exactly good value:

  Each Pi can apparently compute at .175 GFLOP/s, so in theory this cluster could run at a max of 11.2 GFLOPS/s.

  A single £250 graphic card (eg. OpenCL on a Radeon 5870) can compute at 2.72 TFLOP/s, or 240 times faster for a tenth the price.

  Being general purpose CPUs the Pis may be able to outperform a gfx card on some types of calculations and would probably be easier to program tho.

  Interestingly a Radeon 5870 would have been the worlds fastest supercomputer in 1999 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Historical_TOP500_table

  • [Dan Huby]

    Each Pi apparently has 24 GFLOP/s due to the built in GPU
    http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
    OK, your £250 graphics card is nearly twice as fast but probably not as useful for general purpose computations.

    • [squidfood]

      Yep!  For generic computations, graphics card programming is still a bear in terms of programming tools.  Many highly-parallel scientific applications are already written using MPI as the standard… it’s worth the speed hit to not have to reprogram.  I’m definitely looking at this!

    • [brainflakes]

      Ah nice, wonder why it wasn’t mentioned in the post (on the Pi site) I was reading

  • [failquail]

     I got the impression this was more about demonstrating *how* to set up a supercomputer cluster for university students rather than actually being something you’d actually use for something!

    Much cheaper and power friendly to use such cheap low power PCs for playing around with :)

• [cjporkchop]

  “The team included six year old James Cox, the son of project lead Professor Simon Cox, ‘who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing.’”

  I hope that kid has business cards. “James Cox, Lego Specialist.”

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    See: Rayner Unwin.

• [jbond]

  cue the /. comment: Wow! Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

• [Ashley Yakeley]

  “Lego rack mount” is so much less exciting than “Lego supercomputer”…

• [Justifun]

  You can find Raspberry Pi’s in stock here
  http://www.mcmelectronics.com/content/en-US/raspberry-pi

• [redesigned]

  “The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

  They had me at the Pi on Pi action. :-)