Support for Raspberry Pi

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 714152037
RAC: 909546
Topic 197257

I just realized that we never really did an official announcement that we support the Raspberry Pi credit-card-size computer here at tada...let it be known that we do :-).

If you use the most popular OS on the Raspi, the "Raspian" Linux distribution derived from Debian wheezy, you can install Boinc right away from the repository via "aptitude". Attaching to Einstein@Home is then done just like on any other Desktop platform, e.g. you can use the familiar BOINC Manager.

The Raspi crunches the same shorter-than-usual BRP4 tasks that are currently also used for Android devices and Intel integerated GPUs. A moderately overclocked Raspberry Pi will need ca 1.5 days (!!) of CPU time to finish one such unit, so don't expect to see a big spike in your RAC after you attach a Raspberry PI ;-).

You might notice that BOINC running in the background affects GUI responsiveness more than on PCs: the "nice" level (priority) of the science jobs are unfortunately ignored on Raspian :-(. This is very bad if you want to use BOINC in parallel to (say) a media center software like XBMC on a Raspi (yes, that's possible, I do it all the time).

See this thread in the Raspberry Pi forum for an explanation and workaround of this niceness-issue:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=32138

Have fun,
HB

edenist
edenist
Joined: 18 Jan 05
Posts: 2
Credit: 17516500
RAC: 0

Support for Raspberry Pi

I have been running E@H on the rapi's that I have running certain things around my home and lab, so it is great to use them for some extra computational input.

There is a new GPU_FFT library which has been released which allows fourier transforms to be performed on the raspi's GPU, resulting in up to a 10x performance increase.

I don't know how much of the BRP's computation is comprised of FFT's, but would this library be of any use to the BRP application on raspberry pi?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5934

Mark Scheuern
Mark Scheuern
Joined: 20 Feb 11
Posts: 2
Credit: 2846222
RAC: 1309

Something I'd like to see,

Something I'd like to see, too, since I currently have a couple of RPis running Einstein@home. See this post and the reply.
http://einsteinathome.org/node/196560&nowrap=true#130098

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
Moderator
Joined: 28 Aug 06
Posts: 3522
Credit: 714152037
RAC: 909546

Hi! Yeah, this new Raspi

Hi!

Yeah, this new Raspi GPU FFT stuff is very exciting indeed.

Since the number of Raspis (let alone their share on the overall computing power of E@H) is rather small (almost not measurable), I cannot allocate any of my official time at AEI to this. It's just too insignificant for the project as a whole. But being a Raspberry Pi fan, I'll try to get this going as a private project in my spare time .... as soon as I can. I'd like to see my Raspi outperform my Samsung Galaxy S3 mini ... that would be really cool.

Cheers
HB

Mark Scheuern
Mark Scheuern
Joined: 20 Feb 11
Posts: 2
Credit: 2846222
RAC: 1309

That's great, HB. Thank you.

That's great, HB. Thank you. This will be very cool.

KeithSloan
KeithSloan
Joined: 13 Aug 10
Posts: 35
Credit: 1180559
RAC: 0

RE: Hi! Yeah, this new

Quote:

Hi!

Yeah, this new Raspi GPU FFT stuff is very exciting indeed.

Cheers
HB

Any news on developments?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.