I was cruising Facebook the other night and noticed an old work colleague had posted this article about building a supercomputer out of something called a Raspberry Pi.
So what’s a Raspberry Pi? Well, head on over to raspberrypi.org and start reading.
On the surface is sounds like a $35.00 computer would really only be for kids, right? That’s where you would be wrong. Turns out A LOT of folks are playing around with these things and doing some amazing stuff. For example, I was teaching at a customer site a month or so ago and one of the students mentioned he was building a home media center. I asked him what kind of hardware he was using and he said, “Raspberry Pi”. Huh? I’d never heard of such a thing. Did a quick bit of Google’ing and there are lots of folks using these things for all sorts of tasks. I immediately thought of clustering these puppies and doing distributed computing. Alas, I was not the first. Seems there have been a number of folks who are collecting these boards, building cases and setting them up in Beowulf clusters. 
This is the one mentioned in the ZDnet.com article built by doctoral student Joshua Kiepert at Boise State. Pretty impressive.
I’ve since done some more digging and ran across this this 64 node “cluster” put together by the folks at Southhampton Univerisity’s computational engineers. What caught my eye on this build was not the depth and breath of build but rather the design. Simon Cox, the project lead, and his son James (age 6–yeah you read that right SIX!) took some of these: 
64 Raspberry Pi boards, turned to James and said, “Put this together for us, will you? You decide how it is going to look but we do need to be able to easily change the configuration. OH, and we need to be able to easily add to it.”
This is what James came up with. 
Then they wrote up some papers to tell others how to go about doing the same thing! (For the details go here) How awesome is that!
“Oh honey! Where did we put the kid’s old Legos?……”
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