A team of computational engineers headed by Professor Simon Cox from the University of Southampton have developed a supercomputer using Lego and 64 Raspberry Pi computers.
Professor Cox and his son James Cox, with the Raspberry Pi Supercomputer they developed.
Oz Parchment, Mark Scott, Neil O'Brien, Gereon Kaiping, Steven Johnston, Andy Everett, Richard Boardman, and Cox's son James Cox (aged 6) are the members of the team.
Professor Cox stated that after sourcing the required number of Raspberry Pi computers, the team looked for the possibility of connecting the computers to develop a supercomputer. The engineers installed all the software required on the Pi and have released a guide that describes the technique of building a supercomputer.
Simon and James developed a design to build the racking utilizing Lego. James has also involved in the testing of the Raspberry Pi through programming it utilizing Scratch and Python software over the summer. The supercomputer ‘Iridis-Pi,’ named after the Iridis supercomputer at University of Southampton, uses a single 13 A mains socket and message passing interface (MPI) for communicating between nodes utilizing Ethernet.
The total cost of the system excluding switches is below £2,500. The system features 64 processors in total and has 1Tb memory. Professor Cox develops code for the supercomputer using the free plug-in 'Python Tools for Visual Studio.'
Professor Cox informed that the researchers successfully tested their supercomputer by calculating Pi utilizing MPI, which is a renowned initial test for a new supercomputer. This low-cost supercomputer may lay the foundation to motivate students to use high-performance computing and data handling to address complicated scientific and engineering issues as part of the university’s ongoing outreach programs.