[pero]

i don't even know where to start understanding this remark

i am questioning why they are using immensely popular and commensurately overpriced but yet woefully underspecced components instead of something better and/or cheaper

is it just because 'raspberry pi' makes for a hot title in a press release?

[phkahler]

Your question might be answered if you offered an example (or two) of something more capable and/or cheaper. I'm really interested in what you think would be cheaper.

Keep in mind the goal seems to be to build something with a high node-count, rather than just core count so small size is important.

[berbec]

A Nanopi Neo2 is 1/3 the size, similar CPU, has GbE and is 1/2 the cost @$18. [1] I use one for a seedbox/VPN and it is a very nice piece of kit.

1. http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...

[jschwartzi]

Because someone who understood the available resources and the actual user needs performed an analysis and determined that this would be sufficient. Commodity hardware eliminates the need to spend a year or two engineering a custom board, dealing with vendor BSPs, etc. It also eliminates the FTE that would be required to support all this.

They could also have chosen to use a reference design from another manufacturer but it's basically like using RPi but 100x more expensive. There's a good case to be made that this is the most cost-effective design for what they're trying to accomplish.

[imtringued]

They could also just have bought 12 Epyc 64 core Servers to get equivalent performance assuming they are exclusively compute bound. If they are IO bound even just 3 nodes with 100gbit NICs would be enough to outperform the Raspberry Pi cluster.

If they really wanted to develop a competitive cluster they'd need at least a SoC with 4 A72 cores, 10gbit NIC, 8GB RAM, and a local 128GB SSD.

Edit: I misread the article it's not a cluster with 3000 raspberry pies. It's just 3000 cores. 3 Epyc Nodes are faster than this cluster.

[marci]

It's not necessary about speed, it's about how to write code that runs efficiently, concurrently and/or in parallel on that many nodes.

IIRC, that's kinda how ethernet came to be, ther were working on the computing world of the future at xerox PARK, they had to create clusters to emulate the cpu power that would be available in the coming years. Looking at the current trend, from phones to servers, they go from two cores to I-don't-have-enough-fingers-except-if-I-count-in-binary cores. A 3000 cores raspberypi cluster can be an emulation of the computing environemnt of tomorrow, not in term of raw power, but in term of distributed computing, and lead to unforseen invention as the ubiquitous ethernet.

[pero]

pretty sure it's just for its press releasibility but ok

[_wmd]

Please do tell us about these better specced, better supported off-the-shelf commodity components!

Unless they're planning to fab 100 of these, chances are high that the retail margin on a Pi still leads to one of the cheapest BOM for a one-off project like this

[pero]

you do understand that 'better supported' in the case of the raspberrypi means that you are running a 32bit os? that's all they officially support - and have no plans to change

do you really think something or better and cheaper is impossible? the rpi is _the most overpriced sbc on the market_ particularly if you're not using it for raspbian (32bit only) and the module ecosystem

nanopi neo2 and rock64 are better and cheaper alternatives