Every time someone posts their homebrew cluster in any public forum, someone has to point out how useless it is compared to state of the art HPC. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pile of dumpster’d thin clients or a PCB full of CH32V003s, it’s always somehow misguided because there’s no RDMA, or high radix switch fabric, or enough horsepower to run weather models.
You act like the project’s creator doesn’t know this is a toy and thinks it’s a TOP500 contender, and make some wild suggestions that they trash everything and buy FPGAs, GPUs, EPYCs, and a bottomless pit of cloud cycles. Good for you, you also realized that Cray isn’t going to base Slingshot 2 on I2C. Pat yourself on the back, you earned it.
Since we’re slinging unsolicited advice, here’s a bit more: if someone shares their accomplishment, regardless of how fundamentally flawed it is, it costs you nothing and is far more helpful to say “Hey, that’s awesome! I like how you did $FEATURE. Great job!” and stop right there than to be condescending and nitpicky.
Since we’re slinging unsolicited advice, here’s a bit more: if someone shares their accomplishment, regardless of how fundamentally flawed it is, it costs you nothing and is far more helpful to say “Hey, that’s awesome! I like how you did $FEATURE. Great job!” and stop right there than to be condescending and nitpicky.
Sure. You first. Please tell me what $FEATURE of this cluster you like. The best I got is “It looks like Cray from the 80s”, but I’ve usually cared about more software or hardware features than just looks.
I don’t necessarily think that clusters need to be built out of the latest-and-greatest parts. I really do think that a Rasp.Pi Cluster with MPI is more than enough for many students and hobbyists. I also think there are other parts you can use to do that (ex: maybe use a TI Sitara or something), and you’d actually get something respectable from a software perspective.
And BTW: Zynq FPGA is low-end and relatively basic. Its again, the software (or in this case, the VHDL or Verilog design you program into the FPGA). Everyone in this hobby can afford a Zynq, with some dev-boards in the $150 range. That’s why I pushed it in my post earlier. If that’s still too much for you, there’s cheaper FPGAs but Zynq is a good one to start with since its an ARM core + FPGA combo, which is very useful in practice.
Hey, that’s awesome! I like the random holdoff for address assignment, the simple workload distribution mechanism, the awareness in the writeup that I2C was a low effort communications mechanism, not letting perfection get in the way of getting the job done, and the cushions on the enclosure with colors that are a nod to the canonical X-MP skins. Great job, Derek!
Every time.
Every time someone posts their homebrew cluster in any public forum, someone has to point out how useless it is compared to state of the art HPC. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pile of dumpster’d thin clients or a PCB full of CH32V003s, it’s always somehow misguided because there’s no RDMA, or high radix switch fabric, or enough horsepower to run weather models.
You act like the project’s creator doesn’t know this is a toy and thinks it’s a TOP500 contender, and make some wild suggestions that they trash everything and buy FPGAs, GPUs, EPYCs, and a bottomless pit of cloud cycles. Good for you, you also realized that Cray isn’t going to base Slingshot 2 on I2C. Pat yourself on the back, you earned it.
Since we’re slinging unsolicited advice, here’s a bit more: if someone shares their accomplishment, regardless of how fundamentally flawed it is, it costs you nothing and is far more helpful to say “Hey, that’s awesome! I like how you did $FEATURE. Great job!” and stop right there than to be condescending and nitpicky.
Sure. You first. Please tell me what $FEATURE of this cluster you like. The best I got is “It looks like Cray from the 80s”, but I’ve usually cared about more software or hardware features than just looks.
I don’t necessarily think that clusters need to be built out of the latest-and-greatest parts. I really do think that a Rasp.Pi Cluster with MPI is more than enough for many students and hobbyists. I also think there are other parts you can use to do that (ex: maybe use a TI Sitara or something), and you’d actually get something respectable from a software perspective.
And BTW: Zynq FPGA is low-end and relatively basic. Its again, the software (or in this case, the VHDL or Verilog design you program into the FPGA). Everyone in this hobby can afford a Zynq, with some dev-boards in the $150 range. That’s why I pushed it in my post earlier. If that’s still too much for you, there’s cheaper FPGAs but Zynq is a good one to start with since its an ARM core + FPGA combo, which is very useful in practice.
Sure, no prob.
Hey, that’s awesome! I like the random holdoff for address assignment, the simple workload distribution mechanism, the awareness in the writeup that I2C was a low effort communications mechanism, not letting perfection get in the way of getting the job done, and the cushions on the enclosure with colors that are a nod to the canonical X-MP skins. Great job, Derek!