Gridcoin & Raspberry Pi -- Adding 24 cores to the cause!
Hi Steemians,
I always wanted to build up a Stack of Raspberries, to crunch data for Gridcoin projects. I decided to take parts of the bonus I got for Christmas to invest in a Sixpack of those nice toys ;)
Additionally it had to be a new power source and new USB Cables and some M 2.5 Spacers in order to have a nice, shiny and especially stable construction.
Current looks
Currently, I am not really sure what the foundation of the PIs will be. I was thinking on an old piece of wood, slated clean and oiled maybe, to combine the technical with the natural. But I am not yet sure.
Technical Stuff
They are all set up with the most recent version of Raspbian on a 16Gb Class 10 Memory Card. For connectivity reasons, they are also running VNC Server.
As you can see in the pics above, I bought 3 different versions of heatsinks.
All of them are made of Aluminium, but the one on the Pi in the Base of the stack has also a small copper plate.
The heatsinks are glued to the CPU with a 2 component thermally conductive adhesive.
I am quite interested in the comparison between the heatsinks, for additional cooling I will install a noiseless fan, driven over the 5V of the USB Port of one of the PIs.
Gridcoin Projects to crunch data for
Actually, there are not that many Gridcoin projects around, where you can use a Raspberry Pi for.
In short, these are the projects:
- Universe@home
- Enigma@home
- Einstein@home
- Asteroids@home
- Collatz Conjecture
Most of them like Collatz Conjecture or Enigma@home can also be calculated with GPUs and it definitely makes no sense to compete with a Raspberry against a Nvidia 1080ti for instance. Therefore I will stick with Universe@home for the moment, at least up to now this project can not be calculated by a GPU.
By the way, since I have Raspbian installed I am not taking into account any Android on ARM projects.
After a few weeks, when the stack has reached it's full Mag, I will write a short update to this post.
About Gridcoin
If you haven't heard of Gridcoin before, there are many very good introductions here on steemit.
The very short version goes like this: Gridcoin is a Cryptocurrency. This currency can be earned by donating parts of your computational resources for scientific projects. So, instead of calculating "useless" hashes like in normal PoW mining, you can compute data, for instance for projects like LHC@home or SETI@home.
You help to advance humanity and are rewarded for this. For me, this is a perfect win-win situation
For further information please see www.gridcoin.us or www.gridcoin.science or take a look around under the #gridcoin tag.
Yours,
Jan
Content Credits
Gridcoin Logos, @joshoeah
I'm far ahead of you^^
Sodom, how many pi's do you have there?
It should be 50 Pi 3 and 5 Pi 2 (left top corner)
Hey jedigeiss :) Erst einmal: Cooles Projekt, sieht super aus und der Zweck ist auch nicht zu verachten!
Sind die PI´s alle miteinander verschalten oder rechnen die alle separat? Wenn zusammen verschalten, wie hast du das realisiert?
Und weißt du ungefähr, wie viel Strom deine PI´s in der Summe saugen?
Ich habe bisher nur darüber nachgedacht, mir einen zu holen, um ihn als Media Center zu verwenden, aber die Idee gefällt mir auch echt gut.
Freue mich auf jeden Fall auf dein Postupdate und vielleicht magst du mir ja die ein oder andere gestellte Frage beantworten :)
Oh man. A stack of little scientific discoveries.
I like the idea of wood. You could burn the gridcoin and BOINC logos into it which might give it that look you've been looking for xD
Awesome project jedigeiss. I also have a mini-stack of pi's running Boinc. I run seti@home and TN-Grid. The space between the pi's is to big. You can make it smaller and still have run for air to flow through. Keep up the good work and keeps us posted. .
you may want to check out Odroid SBC's, I'm to understand that they have very respectable performance with an 8 core CPU (4 fast, 4 slow). Even better, there's a mini cluster version :)
I can second this, I have an Odroid XU4 and its getting a RAC of 13k, around 1 GRC a day, running fulltime.
I was looking to creating a cluster for compiling anyway, if i ever pull the trigger will post it up here
You can also add TN-Grid, it has an app for it, but for some reason it isnt advertised on grcpool.com .
Interessantes Projekt. Freue mich jetzt schon auf das Update in ein paar Wochen! Ich hatte selbst mal vor Jahren meine Oldschool Hardware für SETI@home rechnen lassen. Kann mich aber nicht mehr daran erinnern wie erfolgreich das Ganze war. Von daher bin ich sehr gespannt und wünsche viel Erfolg! 👍
I've always wanted to build a kinda raspberry pi super computer.
Might actually give it a go now I have moneys to enjoy life.
Looks like a fun project, nice job :)
Ist es „sinnvoll“ sowas bei nem normalen Laptop im Hintergrund nebenherlaufen zu lassen, wenn man sagen wir nu bisschen surft?
Oder rechtfertigt der Nutzen - sowohl wissenschaftlich als auch monetär - den Verschleiß in keinster Weise?
Wenn man sowieso am Strom angeschlossen ist, ist es eine ganz gute Sache. Ich lasse BOINC und Gridcoin auf meinem Gaming/Editing PC laufen, wenn ich ihn nicht benutze und mache so momentan etwa 2-3 Euro am Tag. Für einen PC ist das ganz okay, auch wenn ich wahrscheinlich mit anderen Cryptos bisschen mehr machen könnte. Das Gute an Gridcoin ist halt, dass die ganzen Rechnungen der Wissenschaft helfen und nicht einfach nur verworfen werden wie bei anderen Cryptos.
Ich finde es auf jeden fall empfehlenswert!