Evaluating Performance of SBC Clusters for HPC Workloads
Zdravko Krpić, Luka Loina, Tomislav Galba · 2022 International Conference on Smart Systems and Technologies (SST) · 2022
Clusters of modern Single Board Computers (SBCs) pack significant computing power thanks to the new generation of low-power CPUs. So far, such clusters have mainly been used for educational and hobbyist projects but since their computing power grew, they are increasingly recognized as a disruptive technology, especially in fog and edge computing. This is also due to their low cost and low power consumption, as well as their expendability. In this paper we will investigate how do such clusters cope with compute-bound applications. To do so we will use High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a well-established tool for evaluating performance of High Performance Computing systems, to compare processing power of two 4-node clusters using different generations of SBCs: Odroid U3 and Odroid MC1. The results show that clusters of SBCs are indeed small-scale HPCs capable of running moderate computing workloads that could be generated at the computing edge.