Yesterday, I was in Providence RI presenting a workshop with the CSinParallel folks at SIGCSE'22. As part of the workshop, we demo’d the self organizing clusters that my students use at West Point (shown below):
Before I continue, I should mention that these clusters are truly a reflection of the collaborative effort that is CSinParallel. Specifically:
The case design was developed at West Point by myself and Frank Blackmon The self organizing cluster concept an initial image was developed at St.
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EDIT: In April 2022, the Raspberry Pi foundation no longer allows default passwords on Raspberry Pis. Therefore,
instructions as written originally here no longer work. I have modified them slightly to show how to complete the
headless setup using the new Raspberry Pi imager. The original text still appears, but is struck out.
Today’s post is about setting a Raspberry Pi running the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS for classroom use. This setup is very portable, uses very few cables, and costs about $60.
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I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’m still working on Raspberry Pi (and Raspberry Pi related projects). My latest project is Dive into Systems, a free on-line textbook for introductory computer systems concepts that I co-author with Swarthmore professors Tia Newhall and Kevin Webb. You can learn more about it here: http://www.diveintosystems.cs.swarthmore.edu
Of course, the other bit of news is that the Raspberry Pi 4 was released earlier this summer, and it not only boasts gigabit Ethernet, but configurations that support up to 4 GB of memory.
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On February 1, 2018 I had the fantastic opportunity to give a talk at TEDx West Point. I was selected to represent the Academy in November of 2017 at the event. It was a huge honor, since most of the selected speakers were cadets (by design), and very few faculty were selected.
Today, my TEDx talk was finally posted! A link appears below. It is titled “Tomorrow’s Personal Computer”, and makes the argument why computers must stay personal in order to inspire the next generation of computer scientists.
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Note: this is a post I created in 2018. I got distracted by some other things and forgot to fully update it. I made some further updates when I discovered the issues in 2021. Sorry!
This is the second cluster system that I’m exploring this summer. In recent years a lot of commercial microcluster solutions have started popping up. Last post, I reviewed PiRacks. In this post, I will review Picocluster.
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Another summer, and I’m exploring building yet another cluster. Back in 2014 when I started designing my cluster materials, there weren’t a lot of great options for cases for SBC-based microclusters. So I (and Frank Blackmon, our department tech) designed some for the parallella and the raspberry pi. They were pretty great, and I’ve used them extensively for many clusters that I’ve built in the last four years. I’ve presented some of the cluster designs at SIGCSE back in 2015 and 2016.
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I have a few more posts in mind for this summer, but I wanted to create this one while the information was still fresh in my head. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that the original Raspberry Pi cluster tutorial created by Dr. Simon Cox at the University of South Hampton no longer seems to exist. This has always been to me the de-facto go-to tutorial for creating Raspberry Pi images.
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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted! It’s another summer and I am creating yet another cluster. One thing people may not know is back in the summer of 2014 as I anxiously waited for the release of the Parallella I was originally going to use Raspberry Pis in my parallel computing course. Of course the Parallella came out, and so I put my Pis back on the shelf and concentrated on the Parallella for the course.
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