pi-cluster
Background / Purpose / Getting Started / Cluster Guide
Raspberry Pi Cluster
A full guide on how to build a portable cluster of credit-card sized Raspberry Pi computer boards.
What is a Raspberry Pi?
A Raspberry Pi a is credit-card sized, low-cost and high-performance computer board. This little device is capable of doing everything you would expect a desktop or full-sized computer to do; that is browsing the internet, playing video games, working on spreadsheets, word processing and playing high-definition video.
How is a Raspberry Pi different from a Computer?
A Raspberry Pi is a small-sized computer compared to a full desktop computer. With the latest release of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B which now offers the choice of bigger memory (RAM) sizes of 1GB, 2GB or 4GB than it’s previous versions, we can barely tell the difference since you can do the same tasks you would do in a regular computer.
Although that is the case, the one major difference is in their central processing unit (CPU).
Processors (CPUs) in full-desktop computers are based off an x86 architecture mainly built by Intel or AMD while processors in small circuit boards such as the Raspberry Pi are based off an ARM architecture design bought and built by other companies.
It is worth mentioning that operating system (OS) support is also different given each architecture has it’s own instruction set architecture (ISA). That means an OS released to support a x86 architecture will not support ARM-based processors mainly because the ISA with which the OS is developed is different.
You can still use a Raspberry Pi as your main computer and would still be able to accomplish almost the same as in a full-desktop PC if the desired operating system supports ARM processors. There is a whole open world when it comes to using a Raspberry Pi. I encourage you to check out some cool and fun projects at https://projects.raspberrypi.org.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks go to many of the tutorials I used to construct my own. Therefore, I do not credit the entire guide to myself, this is a guide I built based on what worked for me following other(s) and adding to that.
For a list of references or resources that I used, please refer to our References page in our Wiki.