Saturday, August 29, 2020

30th of August

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. It currently consists of:
3 x Raspberry Pi4 (8GB)
2 x Raspberry Pi4 (2GB) as support nodes
10 x Raspberry Pi3


Current work
The three Pi4 (8GB) are running Einstein and the occasional Rosetta work. Even though they have the same project share (50%) and both projects are allowed work, they are making up for all the time spent running Rosetta. I expect they will even out next week and split the cores between the two projects.

The ten Pi3 are only attached to the Einstein project.


Operating Systems
All the Pi4's are running Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit. This allows them to run the Rosetta aarch64 app and the unofficial Einstein aarch64 app.

The Pi3's are running Raspbian (32 bit).


Future plans
The intention is to replace the Pi3's with Pi4 8GB. This will allow apps that want more memory (like Rosetta) to take advantage. The suppliers are still restricting how many Pi4 8GB that can be purchased at a time.

Another issue is around powering a number of them from a single power supply unit. There is no off the shelf power supply available for 4 or more Pi4's so you have to build your own or have power strips full of power adapters and lots of messy cables.