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Big Data, Hadoop, NumPy, R cluster computing etc. are pretty hot topics. To get my hands on them and get a deeper understanding I have decided to build my own cluster out of small Raspberry Pi 2 computers. I am not the first one to come up with this idea, you can find a few nice examples online.

I have decided to use five Raspberry Pi 2 and one Banana Pi in this cluster. The Banana Pi has the advantage of being equipped with a Serial ATA port, my plan is to use it to store the data the Raspberries are working on.

The general setup is the following:

1. 5 x Raspberry Pi 2 from Pollin for 37.95 Euro each
2. A TP-Link 8-Port Gigabit Switch for 20.99 Euro
3. a 6-Port RAVpower USB power source (3 x 1.0 Amp, 3 x 2.4 Amp) for 17.99 Euro
4. a couple of five micro USB cables for 12.99 Euro
5. Identical 16 GB micro-SD cards from Sandisk, Class 10 for 10.99 each
6. the Banana Pi (I got mine from notebooksbilliger.de for 33.89 Euro)
7. a SATA Power/Data cable to connect a 2.5″ harddisk to the Banana Pi

So altogether I spent around 320 for the electronic parts, some other parts (like SD card and USB cable for the Banana Pi) I had in my stash.

In the next article of this series I’ll describe the case I am currently building out of Lego Technics parts…

Uwe

Uwe Ziegenhagen likes LaTeX and Python, sometimes even combined. Do you like my content and would like to thank me for it? Consider making a small donation to my local fablab, the Dingfabrik Köln. Details on how to donate can be found here Spenden für die Dingfabrik.

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