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RPi Blade Server

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sfx2000

Part of the Furniture
Looks like a fun project... if one wants to play around with Clusters/Cloud Tech - good place to start... still have to supply the Pi's - but $250 for the box, $140 for the Pi3's, and 8GB SD cards are pretty cheap these days - If you want to play with cloud technologies - good place to start - Docker/K8, and you have 16 cores to work with - put in a NAS with iSCSI and you have a personal cloud to work with....

BitScope BR04A 1U Server...

01.jpg
GF10G-quattro-application-example.jpg
06.jpg
 
but will it blend :p

We still need cheaper ways to blend all the pis together, clustering them with minimal cost but with a bunch of network cables, as its more of a question of how fast the busses are which on the GPIO may not be faster.
 
We still need cheaper ways to blend all the pis together, clustering them with minimal cost but with a bunch of network cables, as its more of a question of how fast the busses are which on the GPIO may not be faster.

The GPIO lines aren't very fast on the Pi2/3 - think SPI (maybe 10Mbps) or i2c (which is max at 3.4Mbps) - those speeds are under ideal conditions... All the other Fruity Pi clones are similar, in that most of the HAT's are built for Pi's, so for compatibility...

There are many ways to cluster up Pi's - the BitScope boards are nice as they have very good power supply quality - and that solves most of the issues/concerns with Pi's over the long run - most of the "problems" I have found sorting out Pi stability issues have been related to underspec power supplies...

Pi Zero (and Pi 1) - they can run on a cell phone charger... and that was the original intent for the Pi devs back in the day...

Pi2's and later, they really do need a quality power adapter in place (either the Pi official, and I've found that the "Pro-Elec 28-19336" from MCM Electronics is good one - no problems with any Pi based device, and both can support an Asus TinkerBoard at full load.
 
The GPIO lines aren't very fast on the Pi2/3 - think SPI (maybe 10Mbps) or i2c (which is max at 3.4Mbps) - those speeds are under ideal conditions... All the other Fruity Pi clones are similar, in that most of the HAT's are built for Pi's, so for compatibility...

There are many ways to cluster up Pi's - the BitScope boards are nice as they have very good power supply quality - and that solves most of the issues/concerns with Pi's over the long run - most of the "problems" I have found sorting out Pi stability issues have been related to underspec power supplies...

Pi Zero (and Pi 1) - they can run on a cell phone charger... and that was the original intent for the Pi devs back in the day...

Pi2's and later, they really do need a quality power adapter in place (either the Pi official, and I've found that the "Pro-Elec 28-19336" from MCM Electronics is good one - no problems with any Pi based device, and both can support an Asus TinkerBoard at full load.
hmm, it would be nice to design a custom PCB and mount specifically for the pi having the USB connectors onboard to just slot the pi in then connecting ethernet which seems to be the best way to cluster them as not only are they 100Mb/s NICs (1Gb/s for a specific pi), but also have a chip to take the load off the CPU instead of using GPIO which is what this one seems to do.

Instead of SD cards having a single hard drive or SSD for the entire thing and running a single image distributed OS for the while thing. After all the main 3 things for clustering pi is the power delivery, mounting and cooling which can all be designed by yourself. You could design your own high amp 5V PSU using wide PCB copper to delivery and even having USB ports to power other things as well.
 
Here's where things can get fun... if one wants to play with cluster tech, there's always the clusterhat... uses the USB OTG gadget mode that the Zero's have...

ClusterHAT.png


Pi3 B+ has good netboot capability...
 
Here's where things can get fun... if one wants to play with cluster tech, there's always the clusterhat... uses the USB OTG gadget mode that the Zero's have...

View attachment 13373

Pi3 B+ has good netboot capability...
very compact, not to mention you can do ethernet from usb. upon searching the best and cheapest way to cluster the pi2/3 is via a large 5V supply, usb to gigabit adapter, a switch and a mini PC to provide storage, pxe boot and as a router to assign each pi.
 
Pi Zero's can do USB ethernet via Gadget mode, but they can't boot via USB, so one needs to have an uSD card for each one...

That being said, it's a nice little platform to play around with cluster and cloud computing at a relatively low cost - Raspbian does support Docker, and the Pi Zero's can run it.

That being said, the Pi3 host will outrun them performance-wise, but still - Docker/K8/OpenStack - nice little homelab/teaching box for less than $200USD....

Nice resource for Pi and Docker -- https://blog.alexellis.io/tag/raspberry-pi/

good clusterhat review -- http://climbers.net/sbc/clusterhat-review-raspberry-pi-zero/

When one grows out of the ClusterHat, then the BitScope board is a nice step forward...
 

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