Design, Construction, and Use of a Single Board Computer Beowulf Cluster: Application of the Small-Footprint, Low-Cost, InSignal 5420 Octa Board

TL;DR

This paper details the design and implementation of a low-cost, small-footprint Beowulf cluster using InSignal 5420 boards, demonstrating its practical application for high-performance computing and software deployment in a business environment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, cost-effective single-board cluster with 64 cores, showcasing its potential for practical computing tasks and integration with open-source software.

Findings

Achieved approximately 400 GFLOPs performance

Built the cluster for just over $2,300

Demonstrated software versatility with Elastic Search and ownCloud

Abstract

In recent years development in the area of Single Board Computing has been advancing rapidly. At Wolters Kluwer's Corporate Legal Services Division a prototyping effort was undertaken to establish the utility of such devices for practical and general computing needs. This paper presents the background of this work, the design and construction of a 64 core 96 GHz cluster, and their possibility of yielding approximately 400 GFLOPs from a set of small footprint InSignal boards created for just over $2,300. Additionally this paper discusses the software environment on the cluster, the use of a standard Beowulf library and its operation, as well as other software application uses including Elastic Search and ownCloud. Finally, consideration will be given to the future use of such technologies in a business setting in order to introduce new Open Source technologies, reduce computing costs, and improve Time to Market. Index Terms: Single Board Computing, Raspberry Pi, InSignal Exynos 5420, Linaro Ubuntu Linux, High Performance Computing, Beowulf clustering, Open Source, MySQL, MongoDB, ownCloud, Computing Architectures, Parallel Computing, Cluster Computing