Print

[subnoize]

Yup, got bored Sunday night and there it was! Raspberry PI! So, I loaded up the Soft "wheezy" OS, installed Oracle ARM 6/7 JVM and installed JPPF. It ran and joined the rest of the nodes.

I actually didn't do anything special to get it to run so I'm sure anyone can replicate my adventure. I've always wanted to build out a grid of gumstix.com SBCs but they were always so darn expensive. The gumstix.com Stagecoach board is really cool and would make a very compact nano sized grid but Raspberry Pi is about 1/10th the price (aka gumstix * 7 + Stagecoach = $2,800 OR 7 Raspberry Pi * $40 = $280). Of course the average gunstix now has 1GB+ or RAM and the little Raspberry Pi is 512MB. The cost is justified for the gumstix but still out of reach for goofing around or teaching classes on grid computing.

I guess I should also get an disk image of a driver running too. The JVM is headless so the admin app will not work but that's ok, its more fun to watch it from your laptop anyways.

I don't know if its legal to post my disk images (it's all open source OS but you know, them lawyers have to get paid somehow) but I wouldn't mind making them available. I think the only guys that would get their panties in a wad is the wad themselves, Oracle.

Have a great day!

[lolo]

Hi subnoize,

I find it truly amazing that you would tinker with JPPF on a boring night. I'm the one supposed to do that!
I any case, thank you very much for sharing your experience with the Raspberry PI and JPPF. This got me all excited, and I can see what I'm going to buy next

Regarding the legal aspect of distributing an image with a pre-installed JVM, I would ask in the Java forums or even to Oracle. I personally would not distribute the Oracle or OpenJDK without prior consent of the licensor. Even though it's supposed to be sorta "GPL", and even though I read many times thorugh all the agreements, it still remains very confusing and unclear to me.

Sincerely,
-Laurent

[subnoize]

Hi subnoize,

I find it truly amazing that you would tinker with JPPF on a boring night. I'm the one supposed to do that!
I any case, thank you very much for sharing your experience with the Raspberry PI and JPPF. This got me all excited, and I can see what I'm going to buy next

...

Sincerely,
-Laurent

Laurent,

Oh, you'd be surprised what I've tried to do with jppf on down time! I think it better to just write up a "How-To Guide" instead of releasing an disk image.

As to running the driver on R-Pi, runs great. Some example apps don't work so well (where it requires a head) on R-Pi but the fractals example runs just beautifully.

So, you need to buy a few R-Pi's and run one as a driver and the rest as nodes. Makes for a great tool to show off just how small a space jppf can fit in and still be usable. I was thinking about setting up Samba on one R-Pi to mount a common disk and simplify rendering images and other data intensive type tasks.

[subnoize]

UPDATE:

So the guys over at raspberrypi.org released a new version of their OS. It now comes complete with the hard-float JDK version 1.7 from Oracle available out of the box. The version I had tested earlier was using the soft-float and was much slower and I had to do the installs myself which was a real pain in the butt!

So, as of today you can install the default RaspberryPi Debian Linux and get Java 1.7 SDK with hardware floating point support standard. Download the node package for JPPF, execute the shell script to start and you've got a tiny node with little or no work.

Happy Raspberry flavored parallel processing!

snz