Towards an energy efficient SoC computing cluster

High performance computing (HPC) systems are omnipresent in processing huge amounts of data. However, power consumption of these systems is becoming far from negligible, forcing software developers and hardware providers to deviate from usual performance plans, and to address power consumption and costs. As a result, small-scale applications are becoming infeasible to run on those systems, making room for the power-efficient HW newcomers, such as SoC (System on Chip), to take that role. The idea of composing a large number of small SoCs in a computing cluster can result in a powerful, green, and a simple platform capable of delivering enough performance for the small applications while maintaining low energy consumption and costs. In this paper we present a system composed of four LAN-interconnected dual-core ARM based SoC devices, powered by a single power supply. We investigate applicability of such a system by monitoring its performance and energy efficiency and stability while using common HPC paradigms: message passing and thread programming.