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...doesn't Debian ship some multiarch/QEMU/binfmt plumbing to make this work? Binfmt to taste the binary, see that it's i386/amd64, and then launch QEMU (and associated ARM multiarch libs) with user-mode emulation?
Slow as dirt I'm sure but it'll work.
Also check out Rancher. Lite weight K8 for distributed IoT. Scaling to 1000s of ARM nodes, clusters morph into incredibly smart supercomputing grids ;) https://thenewstack.io/how-low-can-kubernetes-go-rancher-arm...
Unfortunately, none of the tech referenced in this articled is available yet and should be released end of February. There is a more interesting part that isn't referenced in this article and the is that we'll have two variants of k8s for ARM. One is RKE which is our CNCF certified k8s distribution. The other will be based off k3s (github.com/ibuildthecloud/k3s) which is an optimized k8s distribution for small clusters (smaller memory, easier setup, etc). I expected the second will be far more suited for something like this project.
It's too bad that OpenMosix withered on the vine. Back when it was a thing, I found it really handy to fire up clusterKNOPPIX on a bunch of idle PCs for large compile jobs. I guess with today's multi-core CPUs, it wasn't thought to be worthwhile, but it could still come in handy for resource-constrained systems like the Pi.
Wouldn't doing something like this with FPGAs be ultimately cheaper and more efficient. Sure, it will have a big overhead to learn, build and set up your FPGAs specifically for your problem, but that seems like a constant time overhead?
One caveat when deciding on an ARM platform to adopt is the fact that someone needs to maintain a custom Linux branch for each individual SoC configuration. That means you'll want to choose a platform that's very well supported by its parent company if you don't want to get stuck on an obsolete kernel in a year. Hardkernel, who design and produce popular ARM SoCs, chose to produce x86 based platforms in the future fo…
I really wish we would see a standard Arm kernel instruction set come along and get adopted by every manufacturer who isn't doing something unusual enough to justify a custom architecture.
One caveat when deciding on an ARM platform to adopt is the fact that someone needs to maintain a custom Linux branch for each individual SoC configuration. That means you'll want to choose a platform that's very well supported by its parent company if you don't want to get stuck on an obsolete kernel in a year. Hardkernel, who design and produce popular ARM SoCs, chose to produce x86 based platforms in the future fo…
While the article talks about not being able to run x86 binaries on Arm, this is the real drawback to the platform. I really wish we would see a standard Arm kernel instruction set come along and get adopted by every manufacturer who isn't doing something unusual enough to justify a custom architecture.
Haven't heard of any of the single-board platforms adopting it, though.
This is going to be a stupid question...but what does clustering do? Does it increase the amount of "cores" in a system? What about the RAM? Or is the clustering software a task manager that allocates different boards as needed depending on the the task load?
There are no stupid questions. Clustering allows you to do more jobs at once than you could do with a single machine of the same power. It allows for redundancy if you set things up in such a way that if one hardware components fails another takes over. It can allow for better isolation between processes for security reasons than what a process isolated from another process on the same machine can give you. And many…
One caveat when deciding on an ARM platform to adopt is the fact that someone needs to maintain a custom Linux branch for each individual SoC configuration. That means you'll want to choose a platform that's very well supported by its parent company if you don't want to get stuck on an obsolete kernel in a year. Hardkernel, who design and produce popular ARM SoCs, chose to produce x86 based platforms in the future fo…
It's too bad that OpenMosix withered on the vine. Back when it was a thing, I found it really handy to fire up clusterKNOPPIX on a bunch of idle PCs for large compile jobs. I guess with today's multi-core CPUs, it wasn't thought to be worthwhile, but it could still come in handy for resource-constrained systems like the Pi.
I share your sentiment regarding Mosix. I don't think however, that clustering SBCs is of any value beyond the learning experience. Even a moderately powerful laptop is much faster than a *Pi, e.g. a 2013 Chromebook Pixel is about 16 times faster than a Banana Pi, when measured using `openssl speed`.
My cluster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZDUe-_mzHc