Affordable and Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing Clusters: The Bolzano Raspberry Pi Cloud Cluster Experiment

摘要

We present our ongoing work building a Raspberry Pi cluster consisting of 300nodes. The unique characteristics of this single board computer pose severalchallenges, but also offer a number of interesting opportunities. On the onehand, a single Raspberry Pi can be purchased cheaply and has a low powerconsumption, which makes it possible to create an affordable andenergy-efficient cluster. On the other hand, it lacks in computing power, whichmakes it difficult to run computationally intensive software on it.Nevertheless, by combining a large number of Raspberries into a cluster, thisdrawback can be (partially) offset. Here we report on the first important stepsof creating our cluster: how to set up and configure the hardware and thesystem software, and how to monitor and maintain the system. We also discusspotential use cases for our cluster, the two most important being aninexpensive and green test bed for cloud computing research and a robust andmobile data center for operating in adverse environments.