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Computer engineers at Southampton University have built the first ever Raspberry Pi supercomputer, held together with Lego bricks.
Named the Iridis-Pi, the supercomputer costs under £2,500 and runs off a single 13 Amp mains sockets.
Team leader Professor Simon Cox had some help from his six-year-old son James, who he says is a Lego expert.
"As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer,” said Professor Cox.
The Iridis-Pi, named after the Uni’s Iridis supercomputer, uses an MPI to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. It has a total of 64 processors and 1TB of memory (16GB SD cards for each Raspberry Pi).
"The team wants to see this low-cost system as a starting point to inspire and enable students to apply high-performance computing and data handling to tackle complex engineering and scientific challenges as part of our on-going outreach activities," added Professor Cox.
The team has published a guide so others can build their own supercomputer.
And what was the first test on the supercomputer? The calculation of Pi of course!
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