[timbargo]

Yes!

Los Alamos National Laboratory put together a 750 Raspberry Pi cluster. https://web.archive.org/web/20180825200515/https://www.lanl....

If I have my story straight, it was network booted and I believe is source of another piece of software they developed, called Kraken, that helped manage the finicky-ness of a Raspberry Pi cluster. https://github.com/kraken-hpc/kraken

Kraken is a state engine. In the case of the Pi cluster Kraken provided network images, installed and configured nodes, rebooted nodes, and manipulated their state as needed to keep things running.

Another fun piece of research on Pis out of LANL is that at their altitude, 7000ft, they estimate that on average a Raspberry Pi will crash once every 2 years due to bit flips caused by cosmic rays.

[sushsjsuauahab]

Could you explain a little bit more how cosmic rays move through space and how they cause values stored in hardware to change?

There was an interesting glitch in SM64 where a player was teleported to a new location because of a specific bit being flipped by a cosmic ray. I'm curious to know how the ray flips specific bits (why certain ones and not others), and how the process works electrically.

EDIT: Ah interesting, seems like these particles are like protons coming from supernovae and black holes. They are moving basically at the speed of light, and are much smaller than the electron well where energy is stored in hardware, so that's why they are able to flip exactly one bit when they collide with that one transistor.

[Uehreka]

Just saw this response. That is awesome, thank you.