Banana Pi

[NeoGen]

I was looking around on google for the possibility of building a little cluster out of those boards, and some people have done it indeed
http://www.owncluster.de/2015/07/08/...na-pi-cluster/
http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/201...rry-pi-cluster

That might be complex to achieve but interesting to play with, in the end it should be fully controlled as a single node but have dozens of cores and a large stack of RAM depending on how many of them you cluster together.


But then by accident I stumbled on a site with even smaller boards... have you seen the NanoPi's?
http://www.nanopi.org/index2.html

[Dirk Broer]

I was looking around on google for the possibility of building a little cluster out of those boards, and some people have done it indeed
http://www.owncluster.de/2015/07/08/...na-pi-cluster/
http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/201...rry-pi-cluster

I've looked into similair cases, but I've yet to find one where the cluster can share both WUs and memory (e.g. work on one WCG WU over 12 cores by using the RAM of the entire 40-board cluster)

That might be complex to achieve but interesting to play with, in the end it should be fully controlled as a single node but have dozens of cores and a large stack of RAM depending on how many of them you cluster together.

It is amazing to see how fast a question as "What would you do with a 120-Raspberry Pi Cluster?"
can be translated into "What would you do with a 15-Banana Pi M3 Cluster?" and getting more performance for less wattage.

But then by accident I stumbled on a site with even smaller boards... have you seen the NanoPi's? http://www.nanopi.org/index2.html

I hadn't yet, but they are small in both size (NanoPi-2 and NanoPi-2-Fire are hardly bigger than a Raspberry Pi Zero)
and price (The quad-core Allwinner H3 NanoPi-M1 can be bought for a price as low as 13 US$, the octo-core Nanopi-M3 is,
together with the NanoPi-2 and NanoPi-2-Fire, the most expensive at only 32 US$)
The models M1, M2 and M3 all slightly differ in size (64 mm x 50-56-60 mm, but are generally smaller than the Raspberry Pi A+ (65 mm x 56.5 mm).

[AMDave]

Folding no longer support multi-node clusters using MPI
http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-smp
Clients are now SMP which means running on a single machine with large numbers of cores / blades.
The rational is that communication between cluster nodes is too slow.

[Dirk Broer]

Sinovoip, producer of Banana Pi boards, has a new flag ship in their M (for main?) line, perhaps unsurprisingly called the Banana Pi M6 (don't get distracted by the header showing a M4).
The surprise lies more in the chosen SOC: a Senary (Synaptics) VS680, a quad-core Cortex-A73 (@2.1GHz) with a Cortex-M3 real-time security core @ 250 MHz (-so useless for computing), an Imagination PowerVR Series9XE GE9920 GPU, and a NPU for AI up to 6.75 Tops.
The board further has 4GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC flash and offers a M.2 E-Key for PCIe or MIPI CSI. There are 4 USB 3.0 ports, 1 GbE ethernet and 1 Micro HDMI-in and 1 Micro HDMI-out. Power Source needs to be PD(?) 5V@3A, administered via USB 3.0 Type-C.
The board looks like this (click to enlarge):

The VS680/SN3680 seems to be a quite capable SOC -but these specs make me want a SBC with a Qualcomm QCS605 instead.
More info:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11...-ai-processor/
https://linuxgizmos.com/banana-pi-in...680-based-sbc/