HOW TO BUILD A RASPBERRYPI

CLUSTER
& -

1 Introduction 2
2 Raspbian Debian Wheezy OS: Installation 2
3 Raspbian Debian Wheezy OS: Configuration 3
3.1 Server Side (main node Pi-Srv) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2 Client Side (all nodes from Pi1 to Pi8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4 Concluding remarks 7

Figure 1 The complete 9 nodes cluster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Figure 3 Network diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Table 1 List of parts, websites, and prices for each part and total price . . . . . . 2
Table 2 Configuration of each nodes IP address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

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RaspberryPi was invented as educational device to inspire chil-
dren to study computer science. Nevertheless, in a couple of
years it has become the toy of computer scientists, engineers
and the curious of every age.
This project is our successful attempt to build an educational
RaspberryPi Cluster composed of one main node and eight com-
putational nodes. In this post we try to explain step-by-step our
work in order to allow people to build their own cluster(s).
First of all, we need to make a detailed list of all parts we have
to put together to build our cluster. Listed in the table below
are all of the pieces and respective websites from which you
can buy. Amazon and eBay are the most popular e-commerce
websites where all these parts can be found easily and for low
prices. The prices and the links indicated in the table are the
information at the time we built the cluster. At the moment you
are reading this post could be out-of-date. Use the name of the Figure 1: The complete 9
part to look for more updated information on Internet. nodes cluster

Part Qty Price Total

Raspberry Pi Model B 8x $37.50 $300
CanaKit Raspberry Pi (512 MB) Complete Starter Kit 1x $59.99 $59.99
CablesOnline 10-PACK 6inch CAT5e UTP Ethernet 1x $13.79 $13.79
AmazonBasics 7 Port USB 2.0 Hub 2x $18.99 $37.98
Sony 16GB SDHC/SDXC Memory Card 9x $12.95 $116.55
NETGEAR 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch 1x $41.99 $41.99
BUFFALO AirStation N450 Gigabit Wireless Router 1x $83.99 $83.99
Stacked 3 Floors Clear Raspberry PI case 3x $13.99 $41.97
Total Price $696.26
Table 1: List of parts, websites, and prices for each part and total price

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There are many Operating Systems to use with the Rasperry Pi. They are usually based on
known Linux distribution like Debian, Fedora, etc. For our project we opted for a Debian-
based version called Raspbian Debian Wheezy. A ready-to-use image of the OS can be down-
load from Raspbian Debian Wheezy official website. Once the OS image has been downloaded,
it needs to be installed in the SD card. This operation should be done for all SD cards that we
have, so for the number of nodes of our cluster, nine in our case. However, since we would
need to configure different aspects of the OS, and in order to speed up all of these operations,
we will use a freely available disk imaging utility (from command line). Let us start installing
our image only on one SD card. To do this operation we will need an SD card reader. After
inserting the SD card in the reader, the command to write the OS in our SD card using a Linux
system is the following 1 :
1 sudo dd bs =4M i f =2014-01-07-wheezy-r a s p b i a n . img o f =/dev/ y o u r _ d e v i c e _ f i l e

1 Note that the dd command is very powerful and could overwrite any partition of our system. We must be sure that
we are selecting the right device. For more detailed instructions refer to the Raspberry website. There are guides to
perform this operation with different systems (Linux, Windows and Mac OS).
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(a) Booting phase (b) First boot options menu

(c) Filesystem exspansion (d) Login screen

We can put the SD card into the slot of our Raspberry Pi, connect keyboard, mouse and a
monitor or a TV with an HDMI cable and turn it on connecting the Micro USB power supply.
The first time that we boot our Raspbian operating system, we will be presented a configu-
ration menu. We will choose Expand Filesystem to ensure that all the SD card storage is
available to the OS. Below the screenshots of the different phases. Once the filesystem has
been expanded we can login in the system with username pi and password raspberry.

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Now, we need to configure the network settings of the operating system. Our cluster will have
the network structure shown in the picture.
We use the NETGEAR 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch to
connect seven of the nine nodes, the remaining port is used
to connect the switch to the BUFFALO AirStation N450 Gi-
gabit Wireless Router and the other two nodes are also con-
nected to the router. In our project we use a wireless router
so that we can have a mobile cluster for educational pur-
poses. You can modify the network architecture to better
fit your needs.
As we can see from the network diagram, there is a main
node called Pi-Srv, it will be the head of the cluster to
submit the jobs on the other eight computational nodes.
Furthermore, the main node will share its own filesystem
to the other nodes. This way, there will be only a single
control point (the Pi-Srv) to compile and run the pro-
grams. We start the configuration assigning a hostname
and a static IP address to each node. The table summarizes
Figure 3: Network diagram the network information for each node.
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Hostname IP Address Net Mask

raspberry-srv 192.168.0.80 255.255.255.0
raspberry81 192.168.0.81 255.255.255.0
raspberry82 192.168.0.82 255.255.255.0
raspberry83 192.168.0.83 255.255.255.0
raspberry84 192.168.0.84 255.255.255.0
raspberry85 192.168.0.85 255.255.255.0
raspberry86 192.168.0.86 255.255.255.0
raspberry87 192.168.0.87 255.255.255.0
raspberry88 192.168.0.88 255.255.255.0
Table 2: Configuration of each nodes IP address

The information about address and mask must be inserted in the configuration file /etc/net-
work/interfaces for each node, while the hostname will be inserted in the configuration file
/etc/hostname. We also edit the file /etc/hosts to give each node information about the
hostname of the other nodes. Now we are configuring the head node, so our configuration
files will look like shown below.
/etc/network/interfaces
1 auto l o
2 i f a c e l o i n e t loopback
3 auto e t h 0
4 i f a c e eth0 i n e t s t a t i c
5 address 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 0
6 network 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 0
7 netmask 2 5 5 . 2 5 5 . 2 5 5 . 0
8 broadcast 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 2 5 5
9 gateway 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 1
10 allow-hotplug wlan0
11 i f a c e wlan0 i n e t manual
12 wpa-roam / e t c /wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant . conf
13 i f a c e d e f a u l t i n e t dhcp

/etc/hostname
1 r a s p b er r y-s r v

/etc/hosts it will be the same in each node

1 127.0.0.1 localhost
2 : : 1 l o c a l h o s t ip6-l o c a l h o s t ip6-loopback
3 f e 0 0 : : 0 ip6-l o c a l n e t
4 f f 0 0 : : 0 ip6-m c a s t p r e f i x
5 f f 0 2 : : 1 ip6-a l l n o d e s
6 f f 0 2 : : 2 ip6-a l l r o u t e r s
7 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 0 r a s p b e r r y p i-s r v
8 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 1 raspberrypi81
9 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 2 raspberrypi82
10 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 3 raspberrypi83
11 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 4 raspberrypi84
12 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 5 raspberrypi85
13 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 6 raspberrypi86
14 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 7 raspberrypi87
15 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 8 8 raspberrypi88

Now that we have configured the general aspects of one node we can quickly copy the entire
OS (already configured) in the remaining eight SD cards. In order to do this let us power off
the main node with the following command:
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1 poweroff # when we r e a c h t h e webmin admin console , we w i l l c l a r i f y more about

s h u t t i n g down t h e whole c l u s t e r

Remove the card from the RaspberryPi and insert it again in the SD card reader to make a
copy with the command:
1 sudo dd bs =4M i f =/dev/your_device o f =2014-01-07-wheezy-r a s p b i a n _ c o n f i g u r e d . img

We can copy our OS image inside all the other SD cards running the following command for
each card:
1 sudo dd bs =4M i f =2014-01-07-wheezy-r a s p b i a n _ c o n f i g u r e d . img o f =/dev/your_device

At this point we have the same OS and configuration for each one of the nine RaspberryPi.
The only operation that we need to do is to change the IP address and hostname according to
the table. We can follow the same steps we did for the configuration of the main node. Once
this phase is complete we have all nine nodes ready to take part to the cluster.
In order to assemble the cluster, let us follow the diagram shown previously and the pictures
below.
As we said previously, the master node will share its own home folder to the other compu-
tational nodes. In order to do this operation let us follow the following steps:

. Server Side (main node Pi-Srv)

Installing the NFS Kernel Server package

1 sudo apt-g e t i n s t a l l rpcbind nfs-k e r n e l-s e r v e r

Add the following line in the configuration file /etc/exports:

1 /home/ p i 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 0 . 0 / 2 4 ( rw , sync , n o _ s u b t r e e _ c h e c k )

Restart the NFS Kernel Server

1 sudo s e r v i c e nfs-k e r n e l-s e r v e r r e s t a r t

. Client Side (all nodes from Pi1 to Pi8)

Installing the NFS package

1 sudo apt-g e t i n s t a l l rpcbind nfs-common

Add the following line in each nodes configuration file /etc/fstab:

1 r a s p b e r r y p i-s r v : /home/ p i /home/ p i nfs defaults 0 0
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(a) Close-up of the completed setup (b) The cluster completely setup

(d) A wires mess, this is also an aspect of cluster

computing that we wont have the room to dis-
(c) Installing the heat sinks cuss (cables management)
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By now, any thing you place in the home directory in the head node, should be reflected in
each other nodes home folder as if you have copied it all over to all other nodes too. Except
that it will use some space from the head node only and then will be accessed in a shared
manner from all other nodes. The catch to this is that if you have too many transfers and/or
too much data flowing back and/or forth between the head node and the other nodes, this
will slow your computation. So, make sure to reduce that traffic by placing the needed data
on the actual SD card and leaving that shared NFS volume for just deploying programs.

As for the configuration of our network topology of the cluster, there must be more efficient
configuration targetted at your computation. Our setups main goal was to reduce hardware
needed for connecting the clusters nodes. Yours may differ, you may want best node-to-node
communication latency in which case you may opt for a star-schema for the interconnections
(i.e. a switch connecting all nodes to each other point-to-point wise). This subject goes all the
way to networking and all the details of backbones and interconnect reaching to proprietary
interconnects. As such, we conclude our cluster setup guide and leave the details for the
curious about networking to take a complete networking course.