Saturday, May 28, 2022

29th of May

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7. The Pi4's are doing Einstein@home BRP4 work.


Bitscope blade

I did a couple of posts about this back in Sept 2018. At the time I had purchased one and was trying to source enough Pi3's and a suitable power supply. See BitScope Blade Rack 20 (Part 1) and BitScope Blade Rack 20 (Part 2)

I've dug it out and half-built it. As I expected at the time it has a design feature in that the Blade Duo's sit too close to the Pi restricting airflow so that even Pi3's run too hot.

When I say half-built I mean I have put 10 Pi3's in it. It holds 20. I haven't assembled the other Blade Duo's and power plates, but I have put the rack and back panels together and wired it up. I had 6 Pi3's running yesterday and just need to put SD cards in the others and configure them to get ten going. The case has 4 x 30mm fans which make a lot of noise considering I have only put two of the four fans in so far.

Fast forward to 2022 and Bitscope have an updated design with fans on the Blade Duo's to improve the airflow over each Pi. They seem to be the same 30mm fans they had in the original design. I have asked for a quote so I can get the Pi4's into a single case. They still seem to use the same concept of power plates and Blade Duo's between them. The power circuitry supports voltages between 12 and 24 volts. The original that I have supports between 12 and 48 volts. Fortunately I bought a 24 volt power supply so I might be able to use it to run the Pi4's.


Sunday, May 8, 2022

8th of May

Marks Rpi Cluster continues running 24/7. For the last month or so its been running the Einstein@home BRP4 app. The Pi3's have a RAC (recent average credit) of 900 credits and the Pi4's are hovering around 1900 credits. The Pi3's are only running 3 at a time due to their limited memory, the Pi4's are running 4 at a time.

 

Turing Pi

They sent an email on the 6th of May officially announcing the Turing Pi 2 Cluster board. Its a Mini-ITX sized board with a 1Gbps managed switch, 2x Ethernet ports, 2x SATA3 ports, 4x USB3 ports, DSI and HDMI port, SIM card slot, two mini PCIe slots and holds 4 Pi CM4 compute modules or their RK1 compute modules. Its powered via a standard ATX power connector.

You will need a PC case and power supply. Note if using Pi compute modules you will also need to purchase the adapter boards.

They also announced the Turing RK1 compute module that can be used with the Turing Pi 2 Cluster board. The RK1 has 8 ARMv8 cores (4xARM Cortex A76 and 4xARM Cortex A55) with up to 32GB of memory.

See Turing Pi for their announcement. 

For what its worth I am not planning on getting one of these as I prefer to use the Pi4. While this sounds like a great idea I can scale to more compute nodes simply by adding more Pis.


Update 14th of May

It seems Turing Pi had some delay getting registered on KickStarter. That has now been rectified and their latest email (below) has the details.

When?
May 16, 9 AM PT

How much?
There will be several price options:
Super Early Bird - $199 / each (limited)
Early Bird - $209 / each (limited)
Kickstarter Special $219 / each
Raspberry Pi CM4 adapter board (add-on): $10 / each

Where?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/turingpi/turing-pi-cluster-board
Make sure to click the notify button to grab the Early Bird limited offers.

Shipping cost?
You will find estimated shipping cost info on our Kickstarter page when fully launched.