Study of Raspberry Pi 2 quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU cluster as a mini supercomputer

High performance computing (HPC) devices is no longer exclusive for academic, R&D, or military purposes. The use of HPC device such as supercomputer now growing rapidly as some new area arise such as big data, and computer simulation. It makes the use of supercomputer more inclusive. Today's supercomputer has a huge computing power, but requires an enormous amount of energy to operate. In contrast a single board computer (SBC), i.e., Raspberry Pi has minimum computing power, but requires a small amount of energy to operate, and as a bonus it is small and cheap. This paper covers the result of utilizing many Raspberry Pi 2 SBCs, a quad-core Cortex-A7 900 MHz, as a cluster to compensate its computing power. The high performance linpack (HPL) is used to benchmark the computing power, and a power meter with resolution 10mV / 10mA is used to measure the power consumption. The experiment shows that the increase of number of cores in every SBC member in a cluster is not giving significant increase in computing power. This experiment gives a recommendation that 4 nodes is a maximum number of nodes for SBC cluster based on the characteristic of computing performance and power consumption.