5 ms·

waste of (taxpayer) money using the (overpriced) rpi's gimped (no aes, usb3, gbe) soc the rpi value prop is the community support but that would mean that this

by pero 9y ago

waste of (taxpayer) money using the (overpriced) rpi's gimped (no aes, usb3, gbe) soc the rpi value prop is the community support but that would mean that this cluster is running a 32bit os - so what really is the point of using these instead of something smaller and cheaper or same size and more powerful for the same money

taylorexpander 9y ago
Good that thing national laboratories and research in general don’t have to show profitability then. Because otherwise we’d get nothing done and funded due to the likes of people like you.
- pero 9y ago
  i don't even know where to start understanding this remark i am questioning why they are using immensely popular and commensurately overpriced but yet woefully underspecced components instead of something better and/or cheaper is it just because 'raspberry pi' makes for a hot title in a press release?
  - phkahler 9y ago
    Your question might be answered if you offered an example (or two) of something more capable and/or cheaper. I'm really interested in what you think would be cheaper. Keep in mind the goal seems to be to build something with a high node-count, rather than just core count so small size is important.
    - berbec 9y ago
      A Nanopi Neo2 is 1/3 the size, similar CPU, has GbE and is 1/2 the cost @$18. [1] I use one for a seedbox/VPN and it is a very nice piece of kit. 1. http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=180 http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...
  - _wmd 9y ago
    Please do tell us about these better specced, better supported off-the-shelf commodity components! Unless they're planning to fab 100 of these, chances are high that the retail margin on a Pi still leads to one of the cheapest BOM for a one-off project like this
    - pero 9y ago
      you do understand that 'better supported' in the case of the raspberrypi means that you are running a 32bit os? that's all they officially support - and have no plans to change do you really think something or better and cheaper is impossible? the rpi is _the most overpriced sbc on the market_ particularly if you're not using it for raspbian (32bit only) and the module ecosystem nanopi neo2 and rock64 are better and cheaper alternatives
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    Because someone who understood the available resources and the actual user needs performed an analysis and determined that this would be sufficient. Commodity hardware eliminates the need to spend a year or two engineering a custom board, dealing with vendor BSPs, etc. It also eliminates the FTE that would be required to support all this. They could also have chosen to use a reference design from another manufacturer but it's basically like using RPi but 100x more expensive. There's a good case to be made that this is the most cost-effective design for what they're trying to accomplish.
    - pero 9y ago
      pretty sure it's just for its press releasibility but ok
    - imtringued 9y ago
      They could also just have bought 12 Epyc 64 core Servers to get equivalent performance assuming they are exclusively compute bound. If they are IO bound even just 3 nodes with 100gbit NICs would be enough to outperform the Raspberry Pi cluster. If they really wanted to develop a competitive cluster they'd need at least a SoC with 4 A72 cores, 10gbit NIC, 8GB RAM, and a local 128GB SSD. Edit: I misread the article it's not a cluster with 3000 raspberry pies. It's just 3000 cores. 3 Epyc Nodes are faster than this cluster.
      - marci 9y ago
        It's not necessary about speed, it's about how to write code that runs efficiently, concurrently and/or in parallel on that many nodes. IIRC, that's kinda how ethernet came to be, ther were working on the computing world of the future at xerox PARK, they had to create clusters to emulate the cpu power that would be available in the coming years. Looking at the current trend, from phones to servers, they go from two cores to I-don't-have-enough-fingers-except-if-I-count-in-binary cores. A 3000 cores raspberypi cluster can be an emulation of the computing environemnt of tomorrow, not in term of raw power, but in term of distributed computing, and lead to unforseen invention as the ubiquitous ethernet.
pjc50 9y ago
If you think it's overpriced, you're welcome to build your own one. In fact, you're welcome to provide costed alternatives in your own comment.
- pero 9y ago
  you can buy at least 2 nanopi neo2's for every rpi3b - they have gbe and a non-gimped soc, and you can fit in at least 2 for every rpi, maybe even 4 there are also more powerful alternatives of the same footprint and at same or slightly cheaper price point (rock64)
  - ballen 9y ago
    Also consider the ecosystem for these boards. Do you want your researchers dealing with the non-upstreamed support around Allwinner chips? Additionally consider time to solution, this machine is based on BitScope's Blade: http://bitscope.com/product/blade/ http://bitscope.com/product/blade/.
    - pero 9y ago
      if we are 'considering the ecosystem' then that means these are running a 32bit os, as mentioned in my original comment
    - ballen 9y ago
      32-bit vs 64-bit is largely inconsequential when the nodes only have 1-2GB of RAM. The ecosystem I'm referring to means you can run a vanilla Linux on a RPi with no extra work. You can google a problem and have a reasonable chance of finding a solution around the RPi and so on.
      - pero 9y ago
        no it's not inconsequential for one, why are _researchers_ using largely obsolete technology; for another, many high performance computing tasks perform significantly faster on 64bit (e.g., lmdb)
technofiend 9y ago
The Raspberry Pi 3 model B uses the Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit A53 ARM processor and has been supported since Fedora 25. Here's the link to the AArch64 server distribution: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/27/Server/aarch64/images/Fedora-Server-27-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/2... Having said that I agree the Pi is overdue for a refresh; it needs gigabit ethernet and usb 3 at a minimum but faster interfaces would be great. I think people execute these projects because the Pi is a great reference architecture that can be bought at scale and that has been proven by the large user community.
- jandrese 9y ago
  I'd love it if the storage and Ethernet weren't hanging off of the same USB. Or on USB at all. The USB is a perennial bottleneck on the RPi. There are a lot of boards that implement it correctly in hardware, but then make a hash out of the driver support with binary blob drivers that are fixed to a particular kernel version and crash from time to time. It's probably not technically feasible currently, but I'd love to see a board where all of the hardware is open (even the 3D acceleration!) and already mainlined into the kernel so you could just install whatever distro you want on it and available at a price point under $50. I'm really tired of "you need to dump this proprietary binary blob into the graphics chip before the rest of the board can even start to boot." Why is it taking so long to come up with a universal boot solution, something that could be integrated into GRUB so you don't need to program magic offsets into the bootloader to make it work? PC hardware manufacturers more or less solved this problem 30 years ago, and I'm not taking "but the hardware is so specialized that you can't do it" as an answer anymore. The SBC world is absolutely crammed with stovepipes for no good reason.
- jsgo 9y ago
  I may be mistaken, but didn't they say that there wouldn't be more releases (seems insane to me, but apparently their goal is to drive education and where the board is, I guess, is enough)? Hoping that isn't the case.

by pero 9y ago

taylorexpander 9y ago

Good that thing national laboratories and research in general don’t have to show profitability then. Because otherwise we’d get nothing done and funded due to the likes of people like you.

pero 9y ago
i don't even know where to start understanding this remark i am questioning why they are using immensely popular and commensurately overpriced but yet woefully underspecced components instead of something better and/or cheaper is it just because 'raspberry pi' makes for a hot title in a press release?
- phkahler 9y ago
  Your question might be answered if you offered an example (or two) of something more capable and/or cheaper. I'm really interested in what you think would be cheaper. Keep in mind the goal seems to be to build something with a high node-count, rather than just core count so small size is important.
  - berbec 9y ago
    A Nanopi Neo2 is 1/3 the size, similar CPU, has GbE and is 1/2 the cost @$18. [1] I use one for a seedbox/VPN and it is a very nice piece of kit. 1. http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=180 http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...
- _wmd 9y ago
  Please do tell us about these better specced, better supported off-the-shelf commodity components! Unless they're planning to fab 100 of these, chances are high that the retail margin on a Pi still leads to one of the cheapest BOM for a one-off project like this
  - pero 9y ago
    you do understand that 'better supported' in the case of the raspberrypi means that you are running a 32bit os? that's all they officially support - and have no plans to change do you really think something or better and cheaper is impossible? the rpi is _the most overpriced sbc on the market_ particularly if you're not using it for raspbian (32bit only) and the module ecosystem nanopi neo2 and rock64 are better and cheaper alternatives
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  Because someone who understood the available resources and the actual user needs performed an analysis and determined that this would be sufficient. Commodity hardware eliminates the need to spend a year or two engineering a custom board, dealing with vendor BSPs, etc. It also eliminates the FTE that would be required to support all this. They could also have chosen to use a reference design from another manufacturer but it's basically like using RPi but 100x more expensive. There's a good case to be made that this is the most cost-effective design for what they're trying to accomplish.
  - pero 9y ago
    pretty sure it's just for its press releasibility but ok
  - imtringued 9y ago
    They could also just have bought 12 Epyc 64 core Servers to get equivalent performance assuming they are exclusively compute bound. If they are IO bound even just 3 nodes with 100gbit NICs would be enough to outperform the Raspberry Pi cluster. If they really wanted to develop a competitive cluster they'd need at least a SoC with 4 A72 cores, 10gbit NIC, 8GB RAM, and a local 128GB SSD. Edit: I misread the article it's not a cluster with 3000 raspberry pies. It's just 3000 cores. 3 Epyc Nodes are faster than this cluster.
    - marci 9y ago
      It's not necessary about speed, it's about how to write code that runs efficiently, concurrently and/or in parallel on that many nodes. IIRC, that's kinda how ethernet came to be, ther were working on the computing world of the future at xerox PARK, they had to create clusters to emulate the cpu power that would be available in the coming years. Looking at the current trend, from phones to servers, they go from two cores to I-don't-have-enough-fingers-except-if-I-count-in-binary cores. A 3000 cores raspberypi cluster can be an emulation of the computing environemnt of tomorrow, not in term of raw power, but in term of distributed computing, and lead to unforseen invention as the ubiquitous ethernet.

pjc50 9y ago

If you think it's overpriced, you're welcome to build your own one. In fact, you're welcome to provide costed alternatives in your own comment.

pero 9y ago
you can buy at least 2 nanopi neo2's for every rpi3b - they have gbe and a non-gimped soc, and you can fit in at least 2 for every rpi, maybe even 4 there are also more powerful alternatives of the same footprint and at same or slightly cheaper price point (rock64)
- ballen 9y ago
  Also consider the ecosystem for these boards. Do you want your researchers dealing with the non-upstreamed support around Allwinner chips? Additionally consider time to solution, this machine is based on BitScope's Blade: http://bitscope.com/product/blade/ http://bitscope.com/product/blade/.
  - pero 9y ago
    if we are 'considering the ecosystem' then that means these are running a 32bit os, as mentioned in my original comment
  - ballen 9y ago
    32-bit vs 64-bit is largely inconsequential when the nodes only have 1-2GB of RAM. The ecosystem I'm referring to means you can run a vanilla Linux on a RPi with no extra work. You can google a problem and have a reasonable chance of finding a solution around the RPi and so on.
    - pero 9y ago
      no it's not inconsequential for one, why are _researchers_ using largely obsolete technology; for another, many high performance computing tasks perform significantly faster on 64bit (e.g., lmdb)

technofiend 9y ago

The Raspberry Pi 3 model B uses the Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit A53 ARM processor and has been supported since Fedora 25. Here's the link to the AArch64 server distribution: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/27/Server/aarch64/images/Fedora-Server-27-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/2... Having said that I agree the Pi is overdue for a refresh; it needs gigabit ethernet and usb 3 at a minimum but faster interfaces would be great. I think people execute these projects because the Pi is a great reference architecture that can be bought at scale and that has been proven by the large user community.

jandrese 9y ago
I'd love it if the storage and Ethernet weren't hanging off of the same USB. Or on USB at all. The USB is a perennial bottleneck on the RPi. There are a lot of boards that implement it correctly in hardware, but then make a hash out of the driver support with binary blob drivers that are fixed to a particular kernel version and crash from time to time. It's probably not technically feasible currently, but I'd love to see a board where all of the hardware is open (even the 3D acceleration!) and already mainlined into the kernel so you could just install whatever distro you want on it and available at a price point under $50. I'm really tired of "you need to dump this proprietary binary blob into the graphics chip before the rest of the board can even start to boot." Why is it taking so long to come up with a universal boot solution, something that could be integrated into GRUB so you don't need to program magic offsets into the bootloader to make it work? PC hardware manufacturers more or less solved this problem 30 years ago, and I'm not taking "but the hardware is so specialized that you can't do it" as an answer anymore. The SBC world is absolutely crammed with stovepipes for no good reason.
jsgo 9y ago
I may be mistaken, but didn't they say that there wouldn't be more releases (seems insane to me, but apparently their goal is to drive education and where the board is, I guess, is enough)? Hoping that isn't the case.