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A Raspberry Pi VAX Cluster (2012) (rs-online.com)
55 points by rbanffy on Jan 3, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



Of course there is nothing RPi specific in this setup. I wonder how long the novelty of (re)doing everything with RPi and discovering that it indeed is a general-purpose computer lasts.


As long as the Raspberry PI remains smaller than virtually everything else, I think it will remain of at least some interest. It might not be fascinating, but it's always at least somewhat interesting to see ye olde piece of computer hardware X, that at the time of its construction was, if not record-breaking in one form or another, at least competitive, reproduced in software by the Raspberry PI. Which costs £25. And is probably smaller than the original device's power supply.


> And is probably smaller than the original device's power supply.

It's smaller than the VMS installation tape cartridge ;-)


That would make an interesting container for a RPi.


Agreed. There are many interesting projects that do stuff that is unique to a plattform like the Pi, but the amount of "Did You Know You Can Connect Into Your Pi Without Passwords" and similar is sometimes staggering, and I'm actually not sure if it doesn't hurt the understanding people get of it.


Apparently at least until 2012. Someone made a nice observation the other day, it boiled down to 'anything that you connect the raspberry pi to costs more than the computer'.


Thus the creation of the Rpi compute unit to allow for cheaper hardware clusters.


The RPi compute module is intended mainly as an embedded unit that simply provides the compute power, not all the other peripherals that are not needed for most embedded applications. It's in a sim form factor to allow easy integration into other systems, no one is going to build clusters out of an RPi, but they are useful for (large) embedded systems.


> Of course there is nothing RPi specific in this setup

Indeed. I intend to try it on my Intel Galileo as soon as possible.


Takes me back to my apprenticeship days when I went to Reading (UK) in 1984/5 to spend a week with DEC on a VMS systems admin course, which included setting up clustering.

Back in the office we had a VAX 11/750, which was joined by several MicroVAXes.

Lovely operating system.




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