A raspberry Pi cluster instrumented for fine-grained power measurement

Abstract

Power consumption has become an increasingly important metric when building large supercomputing clusters. One way to reduce power usage in large clusters is to use low-power embedded processors rather than the more typical high-end server CPUs (central processing units). We investigate various power-related metrics for seventeen different embedded ARM development boards in order to judge the appropriateness of using them in a computing cluster. We then build a custom cluster out of Raspberry Pi boards, which is specially designed for per-node detailed power measurement. In addition to serving as an embedded cluster testbed, our cluster’s power measurement, visualization and thermal features make it an excellent low-cost platform for education and experimentation.