[PD] Super computer made of legos and Raspberry Pi computers

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

Being so amazed as I am on the cheapness of the Pi, I wanted to also
compare its processing power to the chips on an iphone, for example. Well,
apparently apple wont even tell you the details of it's chip clock speed.

that's gotta suck

so, being it that cheap, it'd be great if it also were an open hardware,
such as the arduino.

I then found stuff like the beagleboard, which is open and all, but the
200$ seemed pricy, that's 1/3 of Mac Mini (yeap, I like using apple as a
standard for expensive hardware as you have noticed). So I'm figuring that
if apple wanted to come up aith a "Mac Nano", the size of an apple TV, with
very modest configuration comparable to a beagleboard, the price would
kinda be the same in my speculations.

Now, anyone felt compeled to try the Raspberry Pi with arduino? Glerm was
telling me that arduino is now working on a newer version of the hardware
that would take an ARM chip. So I imagine it'd be like having a built in Pi
into the Aerduino, and that you could have an Operational System in it
runing PD. Since Arduinos are so popular, and open and everything, I hope
this would be very cheap and acessible, not to mention that anyone could by
the parts and try to build it themselves for even less.

I don't have any practical application for any of this technology in my
head yet, but there's something about it that really fascinates me, and
that's of course the accessibility and everything.

Well, I will let you pioneers do the hard work of getting stuff to run on
the Pi and then some time later I'll definetly get one of those to play
with.

Well, I'll just kinda ramble out of topic from now on. I wanted to say
that, unfortunately, import taxes in Brazil are absurdly abusive and huge,
so a 35$ Pi can cost us around 300 Brazilian reais - that's about 150
dollars (that's gotta suck), well, this is just so you know how much we're
talking about, but you need to consider that we don't just have twice as
much cash on us just because our currency is worth the half of that... :)
I'd say we get paid less in general, not to mention that poverty and misery
is still an issue. It bums me out so much because things like the Raspberry
Pi is exactly what we need to make technology more acessible to everyone,
and teach kids in public schools how to code, for example. That's why I
hope for such a cheap and open sourced machine anytime soon.

Cheers


2012/9/16 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com>

> Clearly there are cheaper computers other than apple, so I'm using it for
> comparison to give the raspberry pi more chance to stand out in power.
>
> But yeah, I made a bad comparison. First, you can actually have an apple
> macbook pro 2.7Ghz i7 for 2.5k, I was picking a top configuration model to
> compare to the price of this super-computer made of Pis, but the processing
> power would be the same, and it is a notebook and not a tower. So I guess
> the best way to compare the cost of this raspberry super computer to an
> apple cost like machine is the Mac Pro, which is a tower, and for around 4k
> you'd get two 6-core 2.4Ghz intel Xeon. And then 16GB of ram and 1TB HD,
> juts like the pi Super Computer. Now, these are actually old machines that
> haven't been properly updated, by the way.
>
> Anyway, Hey, I didn't know anything about this Xeon Phi, it sound awesome.
> But I figure it was designed for supercomputing tasks, which I also know
> nothing about, and now I'm also very curious to know what kind of computer
> music process you can have with this kind of thing.
>
> But my doubt remains, would the raspberry supercomputer be more powerful
> than this Mac Pro?
>
> And if you say you can have a Xeon Phi Super Computer for 4 grand. Well,
> it seems it would be more powerful than 64 Pis together, right?
>
> thanks
> Alex
>
>
> 2012/9/16 Charles Henry <czhenry at gmail.com>
>
>> On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres
>> <porres at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > now my question is;
>> >
>> > spending 4k to build a Pi supercomputer can give you more power and
>> > possibilities than with a top of the line MAC for example (which will
>> cost
>> > just as much, and be a quad core 2.7 intel i7, 1.6GHz bus, 16GB Ram).
>>
>> I think what you'll want to spend 4k on is a Xeon Phi co-processor for
>> a desktop instead.  It has 50 cores and a 512-bit instruction word
>> length on each core.
>>
>> > I'm guessing that CPU wize it would be more powerful indeed; even
>> thought
>> > it's a modest one, that's 64 cores against 4...
>> >
>> > what I'm not familiar to is how supercomputing works and optimizes the
>> work
>> > by splitting it into all CPU units. Maybe it does work like getting hard
>> > drives into RAID 0 mode, right? Where the speed of file transfer does
>> double
>> > up.
>>
>> You have to write software with MPI (for clustering) or OpenMP
>> (massively multi-threaded) to take advantage of those extra cores.
>> You always lose some efficiency when using multiple cores, but you may
>> speedup the program.  The highest possible speedup is achieved when
>> all processes are independent.
>>
>>
>> >
>> > cheers
>> > Alex
>> >
>> > 2012/9/16 i go bananas <hard.off at gmail.com>
>> >>
>> >> yeah, separating individual instruments / voices from a mix does seem
>> like
>> >> a 'just over the horizon' application.  I'd love to be able to have a
>> stereo
>> >> microphone in the room i'm in now, and separate the sound of the rain,
>> the
>> >> wind, the TV in the background, my typing at this keyboard....
>> >>
>> >
>> >
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>>
>
>
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