Good that thing national laboratories and research in general don’t have to show profitability then. Because otherwise we’d get nothing done and funded due to the likes of people like you.
i am questioning why they are using immensely popular and commensurately overpriced but yet woefully underspecced components instead of something better and/or cheaper
is it just because 'raspberry pi' makes for a hot title in a press release?
Keep in mind the goal seems to be to build something with a high node-count, rather than just core count so small size is important.
1. http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...
Unless they're planning to fab 100 of these, chances are high that the retail margin on a Pi still leads to one of the cheapest BOM for a one-off project like this
do you really think something or better and cheaper is impossible? the rpi is _the most overpriced sbc on the market_ particularly if you're not using it for raspbian (32bit only) and the module ecosystem
nanopi neo2 and rock64 are better and cheaper alternatives
They could also have chosen to use a reference design from another manufacturer but it's basically like using RPi but 100x more expensive. There's a good case to be made that this is the most cost-effective design for what they're trying to accomplish.
If they really wanted to develop a competitive cluster they'd need at least a SoC with 4 A72 cores, 10gbit NIC, 8GB RAM, and a local 128GB SSD.
Edit: I misread the article it's not a cluster with 3000 raspberry pies. It's just 3000 cores. 3 Epyc Nodes are faster than this cluster.
IIRC, that's kinda how ethernet came to be, ther were working on the computing world of the future at xerox PARK, they had to create clusters to emulate the cpu power that would be available in the coming years. Looking at the current trend, from phones to servers, they go from two cores to I-don't-have-enough-fingers-except-if-I-count-in-binary cores. A 3000 cores raspberypi cluster can be an emulation of the computing environemnt of tomorrow, not in term of raw power, but in term of distributed computing, and lead to unforseen invention as the ubiquitous ethernet.