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Comment by nsky-world | Hacker News Reader

Today we are thrilled to announce the Turing Pi V2. The Turing Pi V2 is s compact cluster in a mini ITX form factor with 4 x cluster nodes, 2x mini PCIe (Gen 2) ports, 2x SATA (Gen 3) ports, and new Raspberry Pi compute modules 4 support.

The Turing Pi 2 cluster is architecturally similar to the AWS Graviton clusters. The CM4 processor uses the ARMv8 architecture. You can build images and applications for AWS instances of Graviton 1 and 2, host cloud native apps locally or at the edge and more.

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> The Turing Pi 2 cluster is architecturally identical to the AWS Graviton clusters.

Graviton2 uses Armv8.2-A, as opposed to the Armv8.0-A on the CM4. Graviton2's cores are "Neoverse" vs CM4's Cortex A73, which is also a significant difference. A lot of code will be portable, but these are significantly different cores.

Probably more accurate to put "architecturally similar".

Noted!

On the page you mention CI/CD applications and we are considering using Raspberry Pi for our CI infra (for the lack of a more powerful option). While there are various possible setups, one fairly common arrangement (especially in a more public-facing services) is to start a throw-away VM for each CI request. This is how our CI service works and you can see it here[1] in action.

And while it would have been nice to use Turing Pi, it does not appear to fit our requirements very well because we need to have high-performance storage attached to each node (where we store/run the VMs). An ideal board for us would be a network switch plus for each module a PCIe (or better yet, NVMe) slot and USB 2.0 ports (at least 2x).

[1] https://ci.cppget.org

IT's amazing device!

For now i'm running a few RPi devices and i was dream about such device to put them in for more processing power.

I'd like to know more about the PCIe Gen2. From your comment it sounds like the root port is capable of Gen2x2, or is it 2x Gen2x1 ports? If I wanted to attach a PCIe accelerator card with a standard PCIe connector, is there some kind of adapter cable I would need to buy?

2x Gen2x1

For the mini PCIe, do you mean they will be PCIe 1x slots, or something like an M.2 connector?

And will it be set up where each board gets one of those slots (e.g. 2 boards get single PCIe, 2 boards get single SATA)?

m2 connector is something we are still experimenting with. The first two nodes are exposed to mini PCI express port, the third node is exposed to 2-ports 6 Gbps SATA controller. You can use the network file system within the cluster to access hard drives from other nodes.

I guess it's possible to adapt the mini PCI express port to M.2 pretty easily too. Having it PCI express lets you do other interesting things though too besides just storage.

Would it be possible to install a modern graphics card on this (e.g. some ati Radeon)? That would require some physical adapter on the one hand, and driver support for armv8 on the other.

This is very neat.

I’m sorry if I missed it, but have you announced pricing?

We are expecting the price to be cheaper than the V1, but the final price will be announced later this year.

Excuse me, whats the price of V1? Cant find it on your website.

V1 is $189

Are those USB 3 ports? or USB 2? Do they belong to any particular node?

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