04-24-2020, 11:13 AM
(04-18-2020, 09:24 AM)ajbieee Wrote:(04-16-2020, 06:05 PM)Paraplegic Racehorse Wrote: My minicluster is made of four Pine64 A64 512MB boards, individually powered via cable from a USB hub (network switch and mini-router also powered from same source!) I've had it since shortly after the original Pine64 board was Kickstarted.
How is the Pine64 in a 4-node cluster configuration like yours?
My little Pines are working great! They are not a cluster, in the sense that they do not share any work. They're just configured, physically, as a cluster. 4 individual nodes with 4 discreet tasks.
![[Image: MyPines.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/RZY7T7xW/MyPines.jpg)
Quote:I have a small Raspberry Pi 3 cluster (2-node) and a old and ancient PC cluster (8-node made of PII/PIII processors) and have thought about getting the Pine Clusterboard to replace my old PC-based cluster for the energy savings alone!
I think you're onto something there. I'm holding off on a clusterboard. The slots are really close together, so if you need to add heat sinks to the chips (you probably don't NEED to...), you can't without first figuring out some way to insulate the SoPines because the heat sinks will touch the neighboring cards. I'm hoping a PCIe host card, with better spacing of the DIMM slots, will be released for the RockPro64. I'm also hoping for a SoC upgrade for SoPine.
It actually would be awesome to see an rk3399 (or rk3366?) on a 184-pin SDRAM PCB.
Since it's not uncommon for SDRAM to ship with heat-sink/shrouds already on 'em, something like this could be cooled fairly easily. This doesn't happen with SODIMM. Also, the increased number of available pins provides more IO options for interfacing with components on a baseboard/backplane. In some ways, this would be near-ideal for upgradable tablet-PCs or cheap laptops. Edge-mount the compute module onto mainboard to keep things slim and you're a winner.
