Building a Raspberry Pi 2cluster

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Raspberry Cluster

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…

Series NavigationBuilding a case for the Raspberry 2 cluster >>

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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