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I always reply to these comments because well they are simply wrong for regular Raspberry clusters (this one is stupid though, but still fun to watch):

1) The Raspberry Pi 4 is THE cheapest 2Gflops/W computer ever made and probably that will ever be made in the future too! Peak of energy/resources/lithography/architectures and velocity of money against that, will most likely make it so.

2) You can scale the Raspberry cluster as you want it, only power the nodes you need, it's modular, one breaks you still have a few left, same for the SD cards which BTW while being so slow a Raspberry 2 (2W!) can saturate them they are SURPRISINGLY sturdy (my original SanDisc (every other brand has been a complete scam) are on their 7th year of 99.999% uptime, down when my power company cut the electricity for an hour).

3) The Raspberry cluster is smaller, cooler and silent (if passively cooled, it's the most powerful device that can be fully passively cooled at 100% CPU (7W) without becoming too hot to wear early) and wont fail because of failing fans!

4) For battery backup there is nothing better because beyond total of 100W for 24 hours you start to see the limits of what is practical to manage on a individual basis.

I post this picture every time: http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png (this is how you cool a Raspberry 2/4 hybrid cluster)




> The Raspberry Pi 4 is THE cheapest 2Gflops/W computer ever made and probably that will ever be made in the future too!

Can you expand on this one? I was curious why you think there probably will not be a cheaper one in the future with similar or better specs.


Expanding on #2, when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws, offloading or running a variety of services/daemons on physically separate machines can also improve security. We all get told to reduce the attack vector and this is one way to do that. The organisational hierarchy best exemplifies this security isolation point for an entity, like businesses, govts, etc etc.


> when thinking of things like Spectre & Meltdown ie CISC HW flaws

Spectre in particular is not a CISC HW flaw. It affects ARM and other RISC architectures as well: https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security-updates/specu...


Know your HW. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulne... "Both vulnerabilities exploit performance features (caching and speculative execution) common to many modern processors to leak data via a so-called side-channel attack. Happily, the Raspberry Pi isn’t susceptible to these vulnerabilities, because of the particular ARM cores that we use."


A72 is susceptible to Spectre because it has speculative execution I think.

That article was written before the release of Pi 4: 5th Jan 2018

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=243416

You don't get to 2 Gflops/W that easily!


Someone ran a checker on the RPI4 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=243416#p15344... Results https://pastebin.com/GLRy6uWK "> STATUS: NOT VULNERABLE (your CPU vendor reported your CPU model as not vulne rable)

> SUMMARY: CVE-2017-5753:OK CVE-2017-5715:OK CVE-2017-5754:OK CVE-2018-3640:OK C VE-2018-3639:OK CVE-2018-3615:OK CVE-2018-3620:OK CVE-2018-3646:OK CVE-2018-1212 6:OK CVE-2018-12130:OK CVE-2018-12127:OK CVE-2019-11091:OK

We're missing some kernel info (see -v), accuracy might be reduced Need more detailed information about mitigation options? Use --explain A false sense of security is worse than no security at all, see --disclaimer"

Still seems to be in the clear but some info cant be obtained which might change the results.




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