I’ve had a long standing interest in Parallel Processing, and then a few months ago I came across Octave and its parallel package. Octave is very similar to MATLAB that I use every day, and for the most part basic MATLAB code works out of the box in Octave.

I used this as the perfect excuse to build myself a mini-cluster computer…

The mini cluster needed to be cheep, so I based it on the raspberry pi. After reading around on the internet it became apparent that this has been done before, so I decided that I needed to give it a go and build my own cluster and run some octave code.

Here is the result of my work, all held together with velcro with the operating system installed on each unit. I based the setup on this tutorial, but instead of using a Usb Ethernet adapter on the controller I used a WIFI adapter so it could be placed anywhere around the house.

Things I need to do next are, installing and setting up Octave, also looking to see if I can make a cable to power the network switch from the spare port USB hub, so that the cluster can run of a single plug socket.