PicoCluster Question

[T_ech]

IK that PicoCluster is mainly used for web servers and businesses but can this be utilized as just a personal computer? Basically what I am asking is that are the P64 clusters 3 different computers that do not share the same power or can you just run one OS and just get more processing power out of it, also if you can use it as a PC, can you run an OS on it and how hard would it be?

IK that is a lot to think about and I am sorry.

P.S. How expensive would the cluster cost?

[Madroxprime]

You could totally use a P64 cluster as a personal computer, but a lot of personal computing tasks arn't going to benefit from parallelizing, just because you distribute the CPU needs across your network, and that'll be a pretty big bottleneck for watching YouTube. But. For big tasks like... Calculating pi, or rendering video, or transcoding videos, or you can easily have your slave nodes running headless and then have a script to launch those processes on the cluster versus locally on your master node(which I assume will have your desktop environment and stuff)

Each Node will want it's own operating system so that way each node can work independently on its share of the work.

Cost wise? SD Card, p64, Ethernet cable, power cable per node plus a network switch, keyboard,Monitor,and mouse.

[T_ech]

Awesome! I was thinking more power for Games, thanks!

[PicoCluster]

Picocluster.com is our website

[ataylorm]

Awesome! I was thinking more power for Games, thanks!

Sadly most games are still single threaded, especially game servers.  Some developers have started to take advantage of multi-threading, but I bet 1/2 the games in my steam library are still single threaded.  On top of that the Pine64 doesn't have the best graphics capabilities for any kind of real time 3D gaming.  Perhaps some day they will find a way to create a "virtual" SLI or something for them to combine graphics power across boards, but the network card would provide significant frame rate limitations.

[Epsilon]

Awesome! I was thinking more power for Games, thanks!

Sadly most games are still single threaded, especially game servers.  Some developers have started to take advantage of multi-threading, but I bet 1/2 the games in my steam library are still single threaded.  On top of that the Pine64 doesn't have the best graphics capabilities for any kind of real time 3D gaming.  Perhaps some day they will find a way to create a "virtual" SLI or something for them to combine graphics power across boards, but the network card would provide significant frame rate limitations.

This actually isnt the main issue as a cluster is not a parallel processor, you need specialized software to run on the cluster. You will not find any software or games made to run on mpi. This means there will not be any bonus to running a cluster, and in fact if you spend the money to build a cluster if you have nothing to run on it, it would be better to buy a actual parallel processor, otherwise known as a GPU.