MPI Code Example

I'm not going to cover "benchmarks" on the ClusterHAT, but it is important to illustrate some real MPI code running on the cluster. Rather than run HPL [17], the high-performance Linpack benchmark, and argue over tuning options to get the "best" performance, I find it's better to run the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) [18], which are fairly simple benchmarks that cover a range of algorithms, primarily focused on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) [19]. They stress the processor, memory bandwidth, and network bandwidth; are easy to build and compile; and come in several flavors, including MPI. Also, different problem sizes or "classes" scale from very small to very large systems.

Because the ClusterHAT is a small cluster, I used only the class A test. In the interest of brevity, I only used the cg (conjugate gradient, irregular memory access and communication), ep (embarrassingly parallel), is (integer sort, random memory access), and lu (lower-upper Gauss-Seidel solver) applications with four and eight processors. Four processors included two cases: (1) Pi Zeros only, and (2) RPi3 only. The eight processors case included the RPi3 and the Pi Zeros (a total of eight cores).

For all four applications, performance, measured in millions of operations per second (MOPS), was recorded from the output for the entire MPI group and for each process in the MPI group. These results are tabulated in Table 1.

Summary

The ClusterHAT is one of the most innovative clusters to come along in many years. It's very compact, uses a very small amount of power, runs Linux, and is fairly inexpensive (around $100 for the entire system).

Although it is obviously not designed to be a speed demon, you can use it to learn about common cluster tools and clustering and how to write parallel and distributed software. The ClusterHAT cluster can run Singularity [20] and Docker [21] containers, including resource managers. In a classroom, each student could have a small ClusterHAT cluster on which to run real applications, including AI [22].

The ClusterHAT is one of the coolest HPC pieces of hardware to come out in a long time.