Need a Scalable Testbed, but Can’t Afford a Supercomputer? Try a Raspberry Pi Cluster!

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a large, scalable infrastructure for testing enterprise-level software. Traditionally, this kind of testing is done on supercomputers running hundreds, or thousands, of instances of the software being developed. But, as you can imagine, that gets very expensive very quickly.

BitScope is looking to make this kind of testing more affordable by creating a system for building clusters of Raspberry Pis. Each cluster module can support 150 Raspberry Pi computers, with 144 in use and six as backups. The cluster module only takes up 6U of rack space, so seven clusters can be housed in a single 42U server rack.

Some quick math tells us that’s 1,008 Raspberry Pis running simultaneously, with 42 backups available on standby. With each Raspberry Pi 3 running a 1.2Ghz quadcore processor, that means developers could have up to 4,032 processing cores to work with. The result is a massive, easily scalable infrastructure for developers to take advantage of.

Of course, these are complete Raspberry Pis we’re talking about, so users get more than just processing cores. The BitScope system is capable of taking advantage of all of the Raspberry Pi hardware, which means developers can test software that utilizes physical sensors (or other hardware) that connect to each Pi. While the BitScope Clusters aren’t available for purchase yet, they should be ready sometime in 2018.