Interconnected Raspberry Pis Become Mega Supercomputer

By now, pretty much every geek out there has probably heard about the Raspberry Pi and its insane innovation and sales. It so happens that this little thing is a marvel of technology that can do much more than you could have ever predicted. The fact that it is so small makes it a perfect little gadget to tinker with, both technically as well as with software it can use. When it was first released, it racked up pre-orders to last for a year. Obviously people wanted to mess with this thing as soon as they could. It almost felt like when the first really good home computer was released, but this time around, the Raspberry Pi had an ace up its sleeve. For the first time ever, someone has interconnected a bunch of Raspberry Pi computers to build a mega supercomputer.

The people behind this interconnected marvel of a build are computational engineers at the University of Southampton in the UK. They ordered 64 Raspberry Pis and got to work. By using LEGO, they managed to create a rack for their supercomputer that would help interconnect their Raspberry Pis. That in itself has to be deemed the geekiest supercomputer rack case every built. In order to interconnect the Raspberry Pi computers, they had to build the software to support 64 of them from the ground up entirely on the Raspberry Pi itself.

The team consisting of 7 people (Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O’Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment) managed to interconnect the computers and ultimately create a beast of a supercomputer. It also couldn’t have been done without the LEGO expertise from Professor Cox’s son James Cox, age 6, who supervised the LEGO construction. You see, interconnecting Raspberry Pi computers doesn’t really have to be grown up stuff. It all comes down to teamplay and a whole lot of geeky ideas. This interconnected Raspberry Pi supercomputer is one of the coolest custom builds I have seen when it comes to the Raspberry Pi. I can only dream of the power this badboy must put out when these 64 computers are interconnected. Just looking at it makes me think I would totally like to try it out.