Exploring cluster computing on a small scale and learning about the limitations of ARM.
There were more PIs in the class however there was not enough MicroSD cards. Yes the Raspberry pi 2b does support PXE however the specific version I had did not have this functionality. With 8 Pis I could do... nothing much, not many programs support ARM 32 Bit chips, I was really bummed out with this info as I was hoping to run Folding At Home. While thinking on what I could do the new instructor for my senior year class came up with "G-Coin" I will be talking about this later in hopes to teach the concept of hashing to his programming class. This was a perfect program to run on the PIs as it was just a simple Python script to mine (Albeit not very optimized, but I had just asked ChatGPT to optimize it to use the whole CPU, it even recommended using C++ to facilitate GPU mining on a PC with an dedotated GPU [I couldn't get it set up]) It got about 16 KHashes/Sec which compared to the other miners and my rig was tiny.
The use of an managed switch was unnecessary however, I had decided to use one regardless as my only exposure was from Cisco Packet Tracer. But physically interacting with one, Plugging in the ethernet cables for the Pis, the console port cable and setting up serial terminal communication with PuTTY, and power will always teach me more than a textbook. I dont recall if I had done any configurations as entering commands is the same as PT of which I have had plenty of experience on.
• Simply getting a newer generation of Pis
• Using FEX-Emu for additional program support
