Meet Kraken!
The best part of building a new Raspberry Pi powered supercomputer is naming it.
Meet Kraken, our third beowulf computes.com powered demo machine! We named this one Kraken because its demo is to brute-force crack MD5 and SHA hashed passwords.
Kraken’s design is more simple than previous models due to our use of WiFi. We did not need to incorporate an Ethernet bridge and cables for each Raspberry Pi. We also went with USB power strips to get away from the unsightly power adapters.
It consists of 14 single core Raspberry Pi Zero Ws stacked in two towers with a 4 core Raspberry Pi 3 stacked on top. That’s 15 machines with a total of 18 cores acting as a single computer!
The Raspberry Pi 3 on top is the Kraken’s brain. It runs a network implementation of the IPFS daemon for managing pubsub messaging and job distribution across all of the connected cores (including its own). We chose this approach to simplify the SD card burning. All RPi0Ws are identical.
Here’s a video of the Kraken in action!
