Building a 4-node Raspberry Pi Cluster 

Dont be shy let your rainbow run,

@@marcsmithsonian9773 My flow of electrons run

@@WaffleTM420 and here you are very wrong my dear... Acirding to RU-vid since youtubers set the laws of phisics there are no electrons flowing inside the cables but electricity is a magical radio wave.. propagating instantly.

@@marcsmithsonian9773 Woah, well hey thanks for letting me know, do you have discord by any chance?

@@WaffleTM420 yes there ate things called electron tubes, and it conducts based on the principle.of electron flow and.not a radio vawe.. and I have a Disco- Ball in my living room. The theories about electricity flow was a coordinated research of umiversities to validate degree of stupidity that can be induce by youtube to general population... results are catastrophic.

lol 3 is not that much for a super computer you need like a few thousand for that level and a few thousand would be much harder to pull off then just three in a cluster

nogosnoqt i heavily agree; my dude seamlessly described in depth a quite complex rpi project, made it funny and threw in some optional CLI powertools usage like its nada. ill press ‘f’ repeatedly!

Best comment here. It's the bottom bit I came here for, the video doesn't cover it

rooooooooooooofl!

CRUNCH

Oof lmao

Lmao

????

Hey, I feel you man. Sometimes I dont get a wink of sleep, just watching youtube videos-we're all just specks of dust floating in an infinite void. If you wanna talk just leave a comment.

Sooo to any future watchers of this video, the Fabric code referenced is now deprecated. It's honestly much easier to use Ansible to accomplish the same concept, but amazing video nonetheless! Definitely inspired me to tackle this

I'm going to use it to setup a training lab for clustering which is where several computers act as a single computer - opensource.com/article/20/6/kubernetes-raspberry-pi. I'm also going to use it to build out Ansible which basically will use one Pi as a master to run and schedule automations on the other 2 or 3 Pi's.

Not only does it look cool, but it helps you figure out which end goes to which CPU when you are troubleshooting your stack!

Hehe, he would have gotten it anyway, but that comment of his triggered my up vote.

Having worked as a network technician for a few years,,,yeah, anything you can do to simplify cabling pays off. Even if it's just 4 devices. You'll never actually see the savings in things like time, frustration and hardware damage, but it's there. It's like not falling off a cliff that you don't know is there.

They are not for decoration they are to organize. Them

+1

Could have made a legit beowulf cluster with linux easily enough.

The word "cluster" is not defined like that, so you just mad that it is not what you wanted it to be

@Samuel Self yes, but he did not do that either.. This is merely a small rack of Pi's. Disappointing....

but what does it actually do?

it would require a new kernel extension or something like it. I dont think Pi will do real parallel processing out of the box.

"close your eyes" XD

Exactly. This video did not - sadly - explain what I came here for.

Yeah, cluster was the wrong word to use here.

@@patrik5123 It still had a couple of cool tricks that would come in handy when it comes time to actually set up a workflow.

@@PaulJohnsonM 100% irrelevant. And not even true.

im wondering that too

It's only to execute the same SSH command on all devices.

Still a cool concept. I wound up going with a machine file so the pi's could actually see && speak to eachother. What are some practical applications for a cluster ? The first thing I tried was a bruteforce lol

Yes, Fabric is definitely cool. It's a fairly extensive tool and worth checking out. I'm currently using my RPi cluster to prototype a small microservice-based infrastructure with multiple Node.js instances communicating with each other over IPC. Next would be using a message broker like RabbitMQ and making the RPis run on multiple different languages.

@Umbrelladroid Actually I am familiar with what a Beowulf cluster or grid computing is. Although I am familiar with the term, I have never built one. I know you can make a cluster that serves the function with mpi/mpich openMPI for arm devices. Have you tried either of these methods beowulf or mpi ? What I was looking to do was find an office that was getting all new computers and getting rid of the old ones in order to attempt making the beowulf cluster. Usually they're recycling or throwing machines away. I have a bunch of machines at home but they're not the same, in order to make this type of cluster, do the machines have to be identical ? I only have two rpi's, a3b+ and pi0w. I was thinking of trying this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RqcHj1DgAMM.html , I know either way I am not going to be breaking any benchmarks with the Pi but the concept is cool. Let me know what you think, and what you think about the video I linked. Thanks.

@Umbrelladroid Okay I will see what its about, is it exclusive to Debian or can I make this type of cluster with other distros ? Personally I like Debian , but I have a few systems running Arch, and centOS, thanks for your suggestion.

Ubuntu

It was a typo during the video and I'm surprised that it worked that way too. The scan probably would have been faster if I had entered the range correctly.

Would this make a decent Plex server?

That was the main point when I was watching this video. He had color coded cables but don't know which Raspberry belongs to which IP address. Meanwhile, I was expecting that he will run different services on different Raspberry :) :) and show something ;P.

@@nunyabizniz8161: no. that's why people are pointing out that there's nothing clusterish about this.

Yes, such a cluster would be very useful in scientific computing. A classic problem is generating all the prime numbers up to N (a sufficiently large number, like a million). Each node will work on a portion of the problem, and then the results can be merged later. This is extremely faster compared to running the same program on a single Pi.

PoE is available only on the 3B+ but you have to get a PoE Hat

+Eric Patch I run some of my own distributed software on them. Mostly just for testing. The downside of using them to communicate with each other is that the onboard Ethernet is slow. You'd be better off buying a more integrated system. But they work great for hosting small instances of web apps and stuff (where people normally use a bunch of small VMs instead)

Hi Davy, thank you for the response. It would be really helpful if you can provide a small tutorial on how to build a simple distributed system and deploy it on this cluster. I've been looking for some other similar videos but your guide is the most clear and understandable. Another tutorial for the software part is amazing.