Raspberry Pi Cluster headless setup with VNC

Yesterday, I was in Providence RI presenting a workshop with the CSinParallel folks at SIGCSE’22. As part of the workshop, we demo’d the self organizing clusters that my students use at West Point (shown below): Before I continue, I should mention that these clusters are truly a reflection of the collaborative effort that is CSinParallel. Specifically: The case design was developed at West Point by myself and Frank Blackmon The self organizing cluster concept an initial image was developed at St. Olaf by Dick Brown and his students The image that the cluster uses was perfected at Macalester by Libby...   read more

03 Mar 2022 | raspberry pi, raspberry pi cluster, rpi3, setup

Raspberry Pi OS - 64-bit headless with VNC

Today’s post is about setting a Raspberry Pi running the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS for classroom use. This setup is very portable, uses very few cables, and costs about $60.00. For people using the textbook Dive into Systems, this setup gives students a Linux system that is compatible with the contents of the book (C programming, ARM64 assembly, multicore programming). I had originally written this post about the Raspberry Pi 4 specifically, but there seems to be a shortage of available Raspberry Pi 4s to purchase. I therefore adapted this tutorial to work with older models of Raspberry Pi (the...   read more

17 Aug 2021 | raspberry pi, raspberry pi os, rpi4, rpi3, setup

Raspberry Pi 4

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’m still working on Raspberry Pi (and Raspberry Pi related projects). My latest project is Dive into Systems, a free on-line textbook for introductory computer systems concepts that I co-author with Swarthmore professors Tia Newhall and Kevin Webb. You can learn more about it here: http://www.diveintosystems.cs.swarthmore.edu Of course, the other bit of news is that the Raspberry Pi 4 was released earlier this summer, and it not only boasts gigabit Ethernet, but configurations that support up to 4 GB of memory. I managed to get my hands on one of...   read more

29 Oct 2019 | raspberry pi, rpi4, setup

Creating a TinkerBoard Cluster

We are getting ready for another microcluster showcase, and I’m really pleased to see that many people are creating Pi clusters! I thought this would be a great new opportunity for me to test out a board that has long since caught my eye and see how easy it is to build a MPI-enabled cluster out of it. First impressions First of all, the TinkerBoard is beautiful. Maybe I’m just a sucker for colors, but I find the PCB to be quite aesthetically pleasing. The tinkerboard is shown below: The processor is an 1.8GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A-17. There is...   read more

24 Aug 2018 | tinkeboard, piracks, cluster

PicoCluster Review (Raspberry Pi 3B+)

Note: this is a post I created in 2018. I got distracted by some other things and forgot to fully update it. I made some further updates when I discovered the issues in 2021. Sorry! This is the second cluster system that I’m exploring this summer. In recent years a lot of commercial microcluster solutions have started popping up. Last post, I reviewed PiRacks. In this post, I will review Picocluster. As before, I am not getting paid for this review (nor do I wish to). I’m simply interested in seeing how well this system works for classroom use. Unlike...   read more

24 Jul 2018 | raspberry pi, picocluster, review, cluster
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