Building the ODROID XU4 Low Cost Cluster

My shipment of ODROID XU4s that I ordered for my low cost cluster came into today. So I set out to assemble the cluster. My daughter “helped” me with this, making it a fun family activity. First thing I did was layout the nodes. Though I knew these board would be small, it did impress me just how small they were. The first task is to attach the eMMC drive to each node. Note that I eventually had to undo this as I later discovered I needed to flash the drives with the latest Ubuntu build. But given the amount of space the PCB standoffs five, removing and reattaching the eMMC drive is not hard. Then I attached the XU4s together with the PCB standoffs I bought. The short standoffs are for the “feet” to the stack, and the long ones to separate each node. Once I stacked all of the nodes, I attached the ethernet switch and the cabling. I Read More …

Hardware Selection for a Low Cost Cluster

For this first phase of my project, I will be building a cluster on the cheap. My cost goal was $600 for a 4 node system, or $150 per node. The Raspberry Pi immediately comes to mind as an option. Indeed, there have been several projects where people turned a set of Raspberry Pis into a cluster. However, since my goal is to create a cluster for Spark, the size of the aggregate RAM pool of the cluster is important. The Raspberry Pi Model 3 only has 1 GB of RAM. So I explored whether there are other options with more RAM. I found the ODROID-XU4 single board computer, which has 2 GB of RAM, and an 8-core ARM CPU. Furthermore, each board is only $76 without storage. It also has some other nice features, such as: USB 3 ports HDMI output eMMC 5.0 hard drive connector MicroSD slot supporting the faster UHS-1 standard Onboard gigabit ethernet Serial console port One consideration is data storage. Read More …