Besides academic uses to perhaps teach distributed systems on these are there any real world use cases for these clusters?
Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
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Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#22Besides academic uses to perhaps teach distributed systems on these are there any real world use cases for these clusters?
- cloud software developers ..
(testing/developing with/without internet connections)
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#23Besides academic uses to perhaps teach distributed systems on these are there any real world use cases for these clusters?
This is a great case study of how the Turing Pi helps with CI/CD for ARM infrastructure https://synyx.de/blog/turing-pi-gitlab-ci-ansible/
Besides that the main direction here is edge computing.
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#24Besides academic uses to perhaps teach distributed systems on these are there any real world use cases for these clusters?
Pretty anecdotal use case, but when trying to do some type of neural architecture search for ML models that are ultimately going to be run on the edge, running some performance evaluation on a raspberry pi is a decent proxy. I have seen teams build their own type a raspberry clusters for this to be able to evaluate many models in parallel. It's basically a testing proxy for ARM architecture.
But this thing only has 4 RPI per box so I don't quite understand which problem they are targeting either.
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#25Today we are thrilled to announce the Turing Pi V2. The Turing Pi V2 is s compact cluster in a mini ITX form factor with 4 x cluster nodes, 2x mini PCIe (Gen 2) ports, 2x SATA (Gen 3) ports, and new Raspberry Pi compute modules 4 support. The Turing Pi 2 cluster is architecturally similar to the AWS Graviton clusters. The CM4 processor uses the ARMv8 architecture. You can build images and applications for AWS instanc…
I'd like to know more about the PCIe Gen2. From your comment it sounds like the root port is capable of Gen2x2, or is it 2x Gen2x1 ports? If I wanted to attach a PCIe accelerator card with a standard PCIe connector, is there some kind of adapter cable I would need to buy?
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#26Long term request for the next Turing ( mixed CPU cards together - in a Box! )
+ ARM cards
+ X86 cards
+ RISC-V cards
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#27PCIe switching would have been really interesting to see, even in a non-concurrent mode. One also desperately wishes that multi-host network adapters had a low-end market. A 1 x 25Gbe connection shared between 6 hosts would be epic. Or if sharing the connection is too much, just a 4 x 2.5Gbe NIC chip would be acceptably interesting & useful to have. I forget, maybe the gbe is free on the Pi4's chip & this is more of…
PCIe switching sounds nice, but let me tell you that it is a terrible nightmare on every level. Hardware: these PCIe switches are finicky as all get out; will it link up to your device reliably? Who knows, depends on how the switch and device manufacturers interpreted the PCIe specs. Software: there is no nice easy standard for connecting host-to-host (which I’m assuming is what one would want on a multinode system L…
I was definitely thinking of NTB, for host-to-host connectivity. As you say, it doesn't provide a whole lot of capabilities. However, there's been a pretty competent ethernet driver available on Linux since Linux 3.9 released April 2013. There's out of kernel NTRDMA if you want ibverbs like communication that will make really good use of the PCIe bus too.
In addition to mapped memory, there are some other modest capabilities: support for ringing the peer's doorbell (one way), & scratchpad configuration. There's a pretty good 2016 presentation on NTB in Linux here: https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...
Interesting to note, Nvidia has docs for settings up NTB on their Pegasus & Xavier systems: https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i...
I for one think more people should be investigating & harnessing the open-source Linux NTB tools. Switches are a bit expensive, but compared to ethernet switches their cost/throughput is great. Alas, yes, the whole ecosystem is woefully undersupported, under-developed. Isn't PCI part of the whole PC thing, this great revolution in computing that allowed interoperability to rise? Such a pity that all the PCI SIG's seemed to fizzle out, that not a lot of people participated. Sure we got some SR-IOV but that feels like as far as we got.
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#28Besides academic uses to perhaps teach distributed systems on these are there any real world use cases for these clusters?
I use mine to host some non-revenue-generating websites (they are super cheap for that purpose), and also for some ARM image builds that I integrate into my Docker/Kubernetes pipeline.
I haven't yet moved to ARM CPUs on AWS for some of my projects, but may be able to more quickly if I can have a local cluster like this for testing that isn't as slow as the CM3+-based one the Turing Pi V1 supported.
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#29Today we are thrilled to announce the Turing Pi V2. The Turing Pi V2 is s compact cluster in a mini ITX form factor with 4 x cluster nodes, 2x mini PCIe (Gen 2) ports, 2x SATA (Gen 3) ports, and new Raspberry Pi compute modules 4 support. The Turing Pi 2 cluster is architecturally similar to the AWS Graviton clusters. The CM4 processor uses the ARMv8 architecture. You can build images and applications for AWS instanc…
I'd like to know more about the PCIe Gen2. From your comment it sounds like the root port is capable of Gen2x2, or is it 2x Gen2x1 ports? If I wanted to attach a PCIe accelerator card with a standard PCIe connector, is there some kind of adapter cable I would need to buy?
2x Gen2x1
Re: Show HN: Turing Pi 2 – a compact ARM cluster with 32 GB RAM
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the mini PCIe, do you mean they will be PCIe 1x slots, or something like an M.2 connector? And will it be set up where each board gets one of those slots (e.g. 2 boards get single PCIe, 2 boards get single SATA)?
m2 connector is something we are still experimenting with. The first two nodes are exposed to mini PCI express port, the third node is exposed to 2-ports 6 Gbps SATA controller. You can use the network file system within the cluster to access hard drives from other nodes.
Would it be possible to install a modern graphics card on this (e.g. some ati Radeon)? That would require some physical adapter on the one hand, and driver support for armv8 on the other.