Research Galore

Recently, I came across a video from one of my favorite content creators, Bitluni about building a Risc-V supercluster. This was one of the coolest concepts I've ever seen in my life, combining the power of 100's of micro controllers to create a decently powerful system.

But then I thought to myself, what if we scaled this up, what if we went BIG.

I started doing some research on cluster boards and how they actually work. I noticed that Bitluni's board was very similar to my Cheetah MX4, 3DP motherboard, so knowing that I kind of had some previous knowledge to what I was looking into, really helped alot!

I figured out that Bitluni basically had this cluster board, and then on that cluster board, it had these connectors called PCIe which allowed fast data transfer but also to basically plug in cards to your board like a PC.

This was such a cool concept, creating a cluster of computers that acted as a swarm, from basically many mini computers, I had to make one too.

You already know how I function though, I needed to go a bit bigger than Bitluni so I started researching about cluster boards, specifically CM4 cluster boards. Basically, rasp pi makes these things called "pi compute modules" (CMx) which can basically plug into these types of motherboards using PCIe or other connectors to turn their plain PCB, into a devboard of sorts with extra features on the cluster board.

Jeff Geerling is a really interesting guy I came across who loves messing around with cluster boards like this, I'd highly suggest checking out his stuff and learning how it all works https://www.jeffgeerling.com/

Anyways, I kind of know exactly what I want to make now, a cluster board with custom compute modules for maximum power, it takes a bit of time to wrap your head around this concept of PCB's on PCB's but it's really cool. I also kind of want to go overkill, I never like making stuff that the ordinary person would make, so something that sounds impressive, like 100's of gb's of ram, or 100's of gpu's, just the wow factor.

I was on a plane basically doing all this research, so it gave me a solid 6 hours of time on research what exactly a cluster board is and how everything works, but I've only just scratched the surface.