Re:How about a backplane? (Score 1)

You meant to say "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" didn't you?

Beowolf - I've heard of that. I think that the poem, Beowolf, has an old vernacular. The computing concept, however - with the term, "cluster," appended - there is a Wikipedia page.[1] As far as clustering with RPi, there's the proof of concept work at the U. Southampton[2].

Personally, I would inquire "MPICH or OpenMPI?" There is some proof of concept work towards the latter on RPi[3]. I'm not sure if it would be of a lot of use outside of C programs, but maybe.

Of course, there would be the question, "What for?" I'm sure Open Science Grid might not be in the market for just any odd item of hacking stuff, for instance, they would certainly have all the resources they need for making predictive, if no pessimistic global climate change models. Personally I'm not sure if PVM would be used for much else, in computing. I'll just not comment about the big monolith of a building in DC, at that, LoL. (I'm not sure how Hadoop might factor onto parallel computing, after all)

Maybe an RPi Compute Supercluster could be used for a bit of AI prototyping, with the old Common Lisp language and an Artificial Neural Network model, specifically after Adaptive Resonance Theory?

In the hardware, I wonder, could a few RPi Compute Modules communicate via a serial protocol to a central chatterbox on a single Compute Supercluster board? The chatterbox, then, could communicate with a "master chatterbox" via PCI. Would that be too naive of a design, I wonder?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
[2] http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~...
[3] http://rhinohide.wordpress.com...