University of Southampton develops super computer with the help of a six-year-old

A team of engineers at the University of Southampton have built a new super computer called Iridis Pi that is a bundled package of 64 Raspberry Pi computers on a single plate. The new computer is energy efficient and cost effective but the amazing part of the whole project is that is was assisted by a six-year-old child. James Cox, the ‘small rack designer’ is the son of the team lead Simon Cox.

The new computer uses 64 ARM11 700MHz processors, 16 GB of RAM and a Terabyte of flash memory, 16 GB flash memory going to every Raspberry package. The whole system is quite energy efficient and yet churns out the effectiveness of a super computer.

James is ‘expert’ at building Lego architecture, a toy used by children. He helped in designing the Iridis Pi to its final version by joining the mocks of all Raspberry Pi circuits on one green board. The final result is a computer that joins the faculties of 64 ordinary working computers and makes an energy efficient super computer.

“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,” explained Cox. “We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.”

The new system will help students at the University in computing large scale data used in researches and also uploading and downloading information and reports.

“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,” he added.

It is revolutionary device because it is cost effective and can be run on a 13 Amp mains socket.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Sep 18 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.