Chris Bensen on Raspberry Pi and clusters
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/29
Oracle’s Pi Supercomputer ; click on the image for a larger version.
In 2019 ans 2020, [Archive] Chris Bensen and his [Archive] Oracle Groundbreakers team built a really large Raspberry Pi cluster of more than 1k pies, all network booting to become a cluster. It was for instance covered in the [Wayback/Archive] Building the World’s Largest Raspberry Pi Cluster – DZone IoT.
On his [Wayback/Archive] personal blog, he wrote a few posts like [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen: Raspberry Pi Overlay Root Filesystem and [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen: Get MAC Address for a Pi Cluster.
It made me also bump into [Wayback/Archive] Building the world’s largest Raspberry Pi cluster early 2020,
Since that wast right after the start of my rectum cancer treatment which lasted longer and, because of I got metastases a few months after radiation treatment, required more treatments than anticipated, I put a note in my bog drafts and kind of lost track.
So I was glad that in fall 2021, I bumped into the draft and found an almost year old post [Wayback/Archive] Chris Bensen: All Raspberry Pi Super Computer Posts in One Spot which is an index in all the blog posts and videos that Chris and his team produced on this project.
I then also learned the cluster had been shown on [Wayback/Archive] Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Breakthrough Starts Here and was covered in the [Archive] Top 10 Raspberry Pi Projects of 2019 | Tom’s Hardware (where I got the [Wayback/Archive] Oracle World 2019 having the 1k+ node Raspberry Pi cluster on display picture shown on the right from).
In autumn 2021, the cluster was missing some pieces; click on the image for a larger version.
I still thing this is a great project, even though by now even better versions of the Raspberry Pi are available.
So I was kind of shocked that Chris Bensen posted these in the midst of the second year of the corona crisis showing the [Wayback/Archive] second picture on the right and [Wayback/Archive] hey, why is here exactly one red part in here where all others are blue?:
- [Archive] Chris Bensen on Twitter: “Funny story about the #WorldsLargestRaspberryPiCluster. We have some plans for it and I checked the lab out. Nobody has been in there for a year! Notice anything missing? I’ll finish the story after all three missing items are mentioned in comments.… “
- [Archive] Chris Bensen on Twitter: “You got it! So the funny story is, the #WorldsLargestRaspberryPiCluster got sent to e-waste and started to get disassembled! Fortunately we managed to rescue it sans those three parts. But we had some backups. So now the Pi Cluster is like C3PO and has an orange USB power supply.… “
The autumn 2021 fix was re-adding missing pies and one missing blue part becoming red; click on the picture for a larger version.
Some videos of this great Raspberry Pi cluster build are below the signature.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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