Abstract

This paper focuses on a High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmarking performance analysis of a state of the Art Beowulf cluster deployed with 24 Raspberry Pi’s 4 (model B) (8GB RAM) computers with a CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz, 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 Cortex-A72. In particular, it presents the increased HPL performance of a Beowulf cluster with the use of the default microSD usage in all the RPi’s in the cluster (SDCS2 64GB micro SDXC 100R A1 C10) compared to using a cluster set-up where the master-node uses a Samsung (1TB) 980 PCI-E 3 NVMe M.2 SSD and the slave-nodes uses each a (256GB) Patriot P300P256GM28 NVME M.2 2280). Moreover, it presents the test results of a multithread execution of a C++ pi calculation program by using one to four cores in one RPi 4 B (8GB) using the above-mentioned microSD. In addition, it presents the test results of a multithread execution of a C++ with MPI (pi) calculation program by using 24 RPi’s 4B with the above-mentioned microSD. In terms of the HPL benchmarking performance testing of a Beowulf cluster where the NVMe M.2 SSD disks are used, RPi 4-B supports and deployed the option to use the entire SSD (MVMe) as a bootable external disk which the boot and root partition (where the actual HPL runs) is hosted in the external SSD. All of them are connected over two Gigabit switches (TL-SG1024D) in a parallel mode of operation so that to build a supercomputer.

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