College students at Southern Methodist College in Dallas, Texas, have created a ‘child supercomputer’ by becoming a member of collectively 16 Nvidia Jetson Nano (opens in new tab) modules, together with a community change, some energy provides and cooling followers. The ensuing cluster, revealed on the Nvdia weblog, (opens in new tab) is sufficiently small to take a seat on a desk, and shall be used as an academic instrument.
After receiving a small grant to create the Jetson cluster, it was constructed from scratch in 4 months by two college students, who additionally created the acrylic casing, greater than 60 of the interconnecting cables, and the facility provides by hand, studying about wire stripping, networking, and laser cutters alongside the way in which. (Just one small fireplace was began.) The pc started life as a group of Jetson Nano modules unfold throughout a desk, utilizing cardboard bins as “heatsinks,” however was upgraded into the present neat acrylic casing utilizing 3D vector information fed into the laser cutter on the college’s makerspace.
“We began this mission to show the nuts and bolts of what goes into a pc cluster,” stated Eric Godat, crew lead for analysis and knowledge science within the inside IT group at SMU. “Our Nvidia DGX SuperPOD simply opened up on campus, so we don’t actually need this child supercomputer to be an precise compute atmosphere,” Godat continued. “However the mini cluster is an efficient instructing instrument for the way all these things actually works — it lets college students experiment with stripping the wires, managing a parallel file system, reimaging playing cards and deploying cluster software program.”
The Raspberry Pi of AI (opens in new tab), the Jetson Nano contains a 64-bit quad-core Arm CPU and a 128-core Nvidia Maxwell GPU, together with 4GB of RAM and USB, Ethernet, HDMI and M.2 sockets. It has a 40-pin GPIO array too, and normally runs a model of Ubuntu that is specifically tailor-made to its {hardware}. The software program atmosphere for the cluster continues to be a piece in progress, being constructed utilizing Nvidia Jetpack, and shall be used for small-scale machine studying duties.
The Jetson cluster shall be on show on the SC22 supercomputing convention (opens in new tab) in Dallas, which runs from November 13-18 this 12 months.