Energy Efficient Cluster

Hi All,

It has been quite a bit of time since my last posts. Renovating an apartment and moving has taken up much of my free time. Now that I have settled, I have returned to one of my hobbies: distributed computing.

In this older post, I talked a bit about one of my recent acquisitions, The Beast. With 40 logical cores, it was great for ripping trough work units. However, the rig pulled almost 600 watts of power. Given my current financial situation, I couldn't really justify the electrical costs. So, I turned my attention to a new direction.

Almost a year ago, I purchased some new SBCs and I decided to get 3 more NanoPi Fire 3s. While there is no fair comparison of processing power, this setup is much more energy efficient than The Beast. So, as illustrated below, the setup includes 4 Nano Pi Fire 3s, 1 NanoPC-T3 Plus and 1 Odroid XU-4. That's right: 48 cores of processing power!

I am powering the setup with two USB charging packs from a power bar with a energy meter. Also, being powered in the setup is a nano router, switch and small fan. All in all, a fair bit of processing power for about 46 watts, or about 1 kWh per day (in my area about $0.20 Canadian).

As you can see, it is doing fairly well crunching work units for World Community Grid, although I have noticed a significant drop-off in processing since the Smash Childhood Cancer stream has temporarily suspended the supply of work units. However, I managed to sneak in a 20-Year badge! Processing is a bit slower with the Zika stream, which is the only other stream that can be processed on ARM (I stand to be corrected here).

Happy crunching!