Doesn't seem practical. It might be useful as a learning-framework for MPI / Supercomputer programming... but it wouldn't be a tool that I'd use personally.<p>A practical baseline for anyone interested in ARM-compute, would be the Thunder X CPU (Cloud rental: <a href="https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c1-large-arm/" rel="nofollow">https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c1-large-arm/</a>). 48-cores per socket, 2x for 96-core servers.<p>As another commenter said: the primary use of this NanoPi is the ability to emulate a "real" super-computer and really use MPI and such. MPI is a different architecture than a massive node (like a 96-core Thunder X ARM), and you need to practice a bit with it to become proficient.
60 GFlops on 96 cores is not that large.<p>OTOH if you want to see how your massively parallel algorithm behaves on a 96-node cluster / network, such a box is just $500, and is portable and can work offline.
What's fascinating in that article is to see that a Raspberry Pi 3 has about 10% of the floating-point processing power of a Cray C90...<p>Cue the many forum questions: "I'm planning to use a Raspberry Pi to control a <simple-ish device>. Will it be powerful enough?"
> The NanoPi Fire3 is a high performance ARM Board developed by FriendlyElec for Hobbyists, Makers and Hackers for IOT projects. It features Samsung's Cortex-A53 Octa Core S5P6818@1.4GHz SoC and 1GB 32bit DDR3 RAM<p>Who needs such a powerful CPU with so little RAM? The reason I have still not bought any Pi is all of them have 2 or less GiBs of RAM and I don't feel interested in buying anything with less than 4.
I've been trying to do something similar with 4 Orange Pi Zero Plus boards (this blog was one of my main inspirations). While I know it's not practical, it's fun to design the case and the stand, how everything needs to connect, and route it all together. I hope to in the end host a distributed personal website on it and a MQTT server on it for any IoT tinkering I'd want to do!
Nice! Distcc based compilation might be something to try on this. :) One thing I noticed is that heatsink fins are oriented in a wrong direction. Air should be going through the fins, not to the side of them. But I guess any air movement is enough to cool this.
The only supercomputer they compare it to is 27 years old, and it uses Gigabit Ethernet as its interconnect. I think they have a much looser definition of 'Supercomputer' than most people.
I wonder what topology this has--it definitely seems reminiscent of older supercomputers like the famous Thinking Machines CM-5, which used a hypercube.