A Single Board Computer and its Cluster Applications

Abstract

Today’s Single Board Computers (SBC) are powerful enough to handle common operating systems and workloads; mostly because of their low cost, small size, portability and low cooling requirements. SBC and SBC clusters applications have grown over the last few years, and keep getting an overwhelming interest due to their cost/performance ratio. This made these SBC clusters more suitable than traditional well-known cluster machines in several domain applications such as Edge Computing (EC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Health care. In this paper, we propose a concise analysis of the Raspberry Pi (Rpi) SBC and the Raspberry Pi clusters in several domain applications, where intensive calculations is required such as deep learning at the edge level. This study intends to invest on how these machines perform in terms of cpu time consumption for different number of clusters, and under different types of operating system.