Malinki

Malinki - Hardware Cluster with Switch Fabric for Raspberry Pi

Rationale

Design cluster solution for Raspberry Pi Compute Module that removes limitations of existing solution.

Uses Raspberry Pi and Ethernet as switch fabric to implement Beowulf cluster. Suffers from limitations due to Ethernet interconnect.

Uses Raspberry Pi Compute Module and Hardware Switch Fabric.

Compute Module is self contained and only needs SODIMM socket plus switch fabric thus reducing cost of the individual node.

Bypass USB/Ethernet bottleneck by using one or all of the on-chip communication interfaces
Provide flexible switch fabric using FPGA
Design mechanically robust form factor

Recent opening of the Videocore spec will unlocking 24 GFLOPS of the available compute power and will lead to developing new applications accelerated by the GPU.
Robust mechanical form factor will open applications in robotics.

Dual Cluster with 2 nodes Stackable PCB with 2 horizontally oriented modules, fixed GPIO, max power 2×3.5W = 7W can be battery powered, limited interconnect using CPLD for switch fabric
Small Cluster with 8 nodes Stackable form factor with 8 vertical modules, virtualized (routable) GPIO, max power 8×3.5W = 28W, full interconnect with FPGA switch fabric
Medium Cluster with 16 nodes Standard desktop form factor (miniITX), combines 2 (back to back) 8 node Small Clusters, standard fixed pin-out, adds power supply connectors, max power 56W full interconnect with FPGA switch fabric
Big Cluster with 32 nodes Standard server motherboard form factor, combines 2 (side by side) 16 node Medium Clusters, adds power distribution and standard server power connections max power 112W