Book Image

Raspberry Pi Super Cluster

By : Andrew K. Dennis
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Super Cluster

By: Andrew K. Dennis

Overview of this book

A cluster is a type of parallel/distributed processing system which consists of a collection of interconnected stand-alone computers cooperatively working together. Using Raspberry Pi computers, you can build a two-node parallel computing cluster which enhances performance and availability. This practical, example-oriented guide will teach you how to set up the hardware and operating systems of multiple Raspberry Pi computers to create your own cluster. It will then navigate you through how to install the necessary software to write your own programs such as Hadoop and MPICH before moving on to cover topics such as MapReduce. Throughout this book, you will explore the technology with the help of practical examples and tutorials to help you learn quickly and efficiently. Starting from a pile of hardware, with this book, you will be guided through exciting tutorials that will help you turn your hardware into your own super-computing cluster. You'll start out by learning how to set up your Raspberry Pi cluster's hardware. Following this, you will be taken through how to install the operating system, and you will also be given a taste of what parallel computing is about. With your Raspberry Pi cluster successfully set up, you will then install software such as MPI and Hadoop. Having reviewed some examples and written some programs that explore these two technologies, you will then wrap up with some fun ancillary projects. Finally, you will be provided with useful links to help take your projects to the next step.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Super Cluster
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

MPI implementations – MPICH and OpenMPI


There are two prominent implementations of MPI that can be used on the Raspberry Pi. These are: OpenMPI and MPICH.

OpenMPI is an open source implementation of MPI maintained by a collection of industry and academic partners. It has been implemented on a number of the world's top 500 supercomputers including the Japanese K computer.

OpenMPI's origins can be found in several other projects including the University of Tennessee's FT-MPI project, Indiana University's LAM/MPI, University of Stuttgart's PCX-MPI, and LA-MPI from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA.

You can find out more about the technology at the official website:

http://www.open-mpi.org/

MPICH, originally standing for Message Passing Interface CHameleon, is an implementation of the MPI standard that supports C, C++, and Fortran applications. It was initially developed in the early 90's to provide feedback on implementation issues to the MPI forum.

The MPICH Wiki providing more background...