We were happy to participate as a maker at the  the 2017 Maker Faire Bay Area located at the San Mateo Event Center. We shared booth space with Johnsonarts. We displayed and demoed a small cluster computer we had created using two Raspberry PI systems and two Parallella systems. These 4 systems, combined with a 5 port Gigabit Ethernet switch, comprise an inexpensive, low power, cluster computer.

Our goal in creating and demonstrating this system was to encourage young students, especially in High School, to explore the popular Raspberry PI systems in ways they may not have thought about before. Specifically, we wanted to introduce them to the “grown up” world of serious high level computer languages such as C/C++ and Fortran, combined with advanced interconnect software technology such as MPI. Our hope and belief, is that exposure to these concepts at an early age would serve students well, giving them a competitive edge, as they progress through to college and future careers. Our hope is that they would also be motivated to choose careers that would embrace Science. The little machine we made, along with the combination of readily available free software, is almost as fully featured as the basic software that would be employed at a variety of the National Laboratories.

In the following pages, we will show how we made our system, and, most importantly, discuss the steps needed to setup the software configuration to enable what we think of as our “Mini Supercomputer”.

Follow this link to read how we created our computer.