Building a RISC-V Cluster on a Budget

The CH32V line of 32-bit RISC-V microcontrollers has soared in popularity with the hardware hacking community over the past few years. This popularity is due not so much to their so-so performance, but because they are cheap — really cheap. In large quantities, a 48MHz CH32V003F4P6 chip can be had for little more than a dime.

This price point has led many hackers to think big when designing their projects around the CH32V. Electronics hobbyist Ronan Mingon, for instance, recently came up with the idea of building a computing cluster out of these chips. A large computing cluster may be prohibitively expensive when dealing with traditional computing hardware, but by using CH32V microcontrollers, it only costs a few bucks. Sure, the performance isn’t anywhere near the same level, but it could make for a nice experimentation platform all the same.

So Mingon designed and built a custom 24-node RISC-V cluster. It is composed of one CH32V307RCT6 controller node and 24 CH32V003F4P6 worker nodes. The chips are all laid out on a custom printed circuit board, and they are interconnected via Ethernet. Each node has an LED that serves as an activity indicator, and the controller node has an external Ethernet interface for users to interact with. The idea is that jobs will be launched onto the worker nodes by the controller, enabling large-scaled parallelism.

Mingon describes the cluster as offering 1.3GHz of processing power for only $10, although adding up the clock speeds of the individual nodes may be somewhat misleading. But in any case, this is undoubtedly an incredibly inexpensive way to play with a large cluster of computing nodes. It is not the first such cluster we have seen, however. Last year, bitluni created a 256-core supercluster of CH32V003 microcontrollers. But Mingon’s slimmed-down design might be more accessible for many people, so it is still well worth checking out.