Blog de pedrilli: Reshared post from Guido Stepken:

martes, junio 09, 2015

Reshared post from Guido Stepken:

What's that?

First, it's a $35 quad core ARM hardware with 1 GByte of RAM, called "Raspberry Pi 2", running UBUNTU.

Then it depends, what YOU want it to be:

It can be a #CEPH storage brick:

Connected to a Gbit Switch, then several Raspberry Pi's 100 Mbit network connectors add up to a super fast storage system with parallel download to your client machines.

Then it can be a server:

Web, FTP, SMB, NFS, #OwnCloud, database ....

It can be a "Snappy Server"

"Snappy Servers are normal Linux servers, but configured a little bit different: You can install and run Redhat, SuSE, Debian, Android Linux distributions in parallel, totally independent from each other. In only 1 GByte RAM? Yes, thanks to #LXC and KSM (Kernel Samepage Merging). Running on one "brainsplit" Linux kernel, multiple, identical binaries only are stored once in RAM. Clever, isn't it? It's an old UNIX feature!

It can be your desktop computer:

What? With only 1 GByte? Yes! Linux isn't wasting so much resources, compared to Windows. Absolutely sufficent for home and business use.

It can be a terminal server:

AMD 8350 with 8 cores and 32 GByte is about $500. But you can run easily 50 terminal clients on it, thanks to KSM. #Citrix like. You even can run Windows in a #KVM container, accessing it via RDP. Graphics output redirected to your -> Raspberry Pi desktop!

It can be an external, accellerated 3D graphic card:

A Raspberry Pi 2 has a GPU, that is extremely fast. 24 GFLOPS. That's on par with INTEL core i5 GPU. But only consuming 2.5 watts! See yourself: https://youtu.be/0j-Wakm5B84 Traditionally, in UNIX, you can redirect graphic output to other machines around the globe. So feel free to redirect it to a Raspberry Pi 2 on your desktop. Or to many Raspberry Pi's at the same time, adding up to a giant screen. You only need to type in 2 commands:

"#xhost +" and "export DISPLAY=IP:0.0" on the other machine.

That's it! Or use free, open source http://ift.tt/1qieMlf to redirect mouse, keyboard, display from or to Windows, Mac OS machines.

It can be a compute cluster:

Many RPis computing power adds up. GPU can be used for floating point calculations, too. It's open source.

It can be a storage cluster:

Using CEPH, you can connect up to 4 external 4 Terabyte drives to each Raspberry Pi 2. 10, 20, ...100 slow Raspberry Pis (only 100 Mbit each!) add up to an ultra fast storage system. IBM Tivoli class! A highly "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers"!

It can be a FIREWALL:

Add a second 100 Mbit (or Gbit USB 2.0, limited to 222 MBit then!) network adapter, install your firewall GUI, that's it!

It can be a (MESH) ROUTER:

Add 2 or 3 WLAN adapters, install #OpenWRT, activate B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol, and you have a zero admin fully automatic, redundant #MESH ROUTER!

It can be a machine control unit:

With 40 external GPIO connectors it can be used to control all kind of machines, robots, drones, ... Even realtime OSes are available for RPi. 50 microseconds resolution.

Finally, It can be a "training and testing machine":

Since UBUNTU on RPi 2 is absolutely identical to UBUNTU on big XEON iron, you may silently check out any possible configuration for final use on really big machines.

Have fun!