[dba-Tech] The atom processor

[Jim Lawrence]

Give a Raspberry PI for a present on this holiday season. 

It is great for anyone who is on a budget, who is technically inclined, wants to build home and office automation, wants a son or daughter to develop skill sets for the new era and on and on. The system is cheap, starting at about $39 for a version 3, with an added micro-SIM chip, of up to 120GB that can be added to the motherboard and 6 USB.3 ports, there is virtually no limit for those who have an electronics bent. With a battery pack, the PI can run for about a week and can attach to anything.

There is a wide choice of operating systems, at least ten...the latest Linux, Windows 10 or RISC OS. There are a number of specialty products, like a media OS (OSMC) library system for movies, videos, pictures, music:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

For a variety of Raspberry PI projects for ever situation see the following link:

https://www.hackster.io/raspberry-pi/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b
http://bit.ly/2jui9GI

There is full documentation on any of the PI versions and there is even a magazine, called Hackspace, for all the latest advances. What about a PI supercomputer cluster?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/pi-spark-supercomputer/:

...And a step by step article on how to build your own 

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Raspberry-Pi-SuperComputer/
http://bit.ly/2k68J3X

The interesting thing about the library that can be added is that it sets up a messaging system that can allow Raspberry PIs to just be snapped together similar to a set of Lego blocks. There is virtually no limit to how many PIs can be clustered: http://www.mpich.org/ 

Aside: The MPICH software is used to connect the nodes of the most powerful and fastest supercomputer in the world (Taihu Light). It is fully open source and is only 11MB of code. It can run on the following desktop operating systems; Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Mac OS, OpenIndiana and Microsoft Windows. 

Jim