(Editor note: A couple of you have pointed out that there is an even larger RPi cluster, “The Beast,” with a jaw-dropping 120 Pis)
When you think about the Raspberry Pi board you probably don’t think about GCHQ — the agency that plays a similar role here in Britain as the NSA does in the US — although you do sometimes think about doughnuts.
However what you probably do think about is computers, big computers, large clusters of them, and that’s what they’ve taken along to this year’s Big Bang Fair — a event for young people celebrating science, technology and engineering being held in Birmingham in the UK — except what they’ve brought along is a cluster built out of Raspberry Pi boards.
GCHQ have brought the biggest Raspberry Pi Bramble in the world to #BigBangFair. It consists of 66 networked Pis: http://t.co/vq49kERlFS — Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) March 11, 2015
Now there have been computing clusters — generally known as ‘Brambles’ — built out of Raspberry Pi’s before, the 64-node MPI-based cluster built by a team at the University of Southampton’s out of Raspberry Pi boards and Lego for instance.
But the 66-node cluster, that’s 8 Octopi clusters with two head nodes for control, built by GCHQ is (probably?) the world’s biggest — if you know of one that’s bigger we’d love it if you’d let us know.
The two head nodes managing the cluster using a home grown system. While the team at GCHQ went through several iterations, they eventually settled on one based on node.js, Bootstrap and Angular.
If you want to build your own Bramble the team at the University of Southampton has put together some instructions. Now all you need is a large box full of Raspberry Pi boards.
13 thoughts on “66 Raspberry Pi Boards Make the World’s Biggest Pi Cluster”
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66 is not a biggest RPi cluster. Here is cluster with 120 RPi’s: https://resin.io/blog/what-would-you-do-with-a-120-raspberry-pi-cluster/
Thanks!
120 Raspberry Pi Cluster https://resin.io/blog/what-would-you-do-with-a-120-raspberry-pi-cluster/ http://www.JiffyShop.com.au
Thanks for the pointer!
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ok, so wtf is the point? just to say you can do it and that its the biggest? why would you need so many raspberry pis? what would a cluster like this be used for?
Like all non-shared memory parallel computers you can use it to do large parallelizable compute jobs using message-passing systems (such as MPI). Clusters like this are used extensively in academia (and industry). With the right sort of problem you can use these sorts of computers to make computational code highly parallel — and hence highly fast.
How big are the clusters that bitcoin mining companies use?
Vice did a bit on this last month. Not clusters per se though.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitcoin-mine
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OK, but can you play Crysis on it?
300 Raspberry Pi Cluster at an university in Italy – http://megarpi.inf.unibz.it/
256 Raspberry Pi Cluster at Virginia Tech. https://www.icat.vt.edu/funding/seemore