Testbeds Easy as Raspberry Pi.

PositionSUPERCOMPUTERS - Brief article

A quest to help the systems software community work on very large supercomputers without actually having to test on them has spawned an affordable, scalable system using thousands of inexpensive Raspberry Pi nodes. It brings a powerful high performance-computing testbed to system-software developers, researchers, and others who lack machine time on the world's fastest supercomputers.

"It's not like you can keep a petascale machine around for R&D work in scalable systems software," says Gary Grider, leader of the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, home of the Trinity supercomputer.

"The Raspberry Pi modules let developers figure out how to write this software and get it to work reliably without having a dedicated testbed of the same size, which would cost a quarter-billion dollars and use 25 megawatts of electricity."

Grider conceived of this solution to provide the systems software community with an...

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