The crew at the University of Southhampton have been working on a Raspberry Pi based supercomputer. “The machine, named ‘Iridis-Pi’ after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi). Professor Cox uses the free plug-in ‘Python Tools for Visual Studio’ to develop code for the Raspberry Pi.” The racks holding the components are made from Legos!
They’ve published links to their detailed build instructions on the Raspberry Pi at Southhampton website.