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Small-board computers
Think Small
The Raspberry Pi [1], a simple, small, but complete system for about $35, has caught the attention of the world. Some people think it's just a cute system not suitable for serious applications, whereas others think the Raspberry Pi, or at least the same type of system, could be the next wave of HPC.
The Raspberry Pi was designed to excite the imagination of children in the field of computer science and electronics (see the "Rasp Pi Specs" box). The credit-card sized single-board computer (SBC) [2] has the basic components of any server, typically with everything on a single circuit board and few to no expansion slots built-in. Today's SBCs typically (but not always) come with the CPU, as well as the memory and other additions, soldered onto the board.
Rasp Pi Specs
The Raspberry Pi B+ has the following basic characteristics:
- Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC)
- Single-core ARM1176JZF-S processor (32-bit processor) at 700MHz
- Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU
- 512MB of memory
- Fast Ethernet (100Mbps)
- MicroSD slot for local storage
- Two USB ports
- HDMI port
- General-purpose I/O pins (GPIO)
This little SBC only consumes about 3W under load, but the performance isn't anything to call home about. A quick run of Linpack [3] shows that a Raspberry Pi Model B achieved about 0.065 giga-floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) for single-precision and 0.041GFLOPS for double-precision. This level of performance won't get a cluster of Raspberry Pi's on the TOP500 any time soon, but that's not the real point of the RPi. The point is to get fully featured systems into the hands of people to help teach them
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