High Desert Times

The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive, single board computer that is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) In these last ten years it has taken the educational, hobbyist and maker markets by storm, because of its large open source community, modest price and ease of programming. The RPi is now in its fourth generation and has spawned a family of products. The most powerful version, the RPi4, is about 100x faster than the original version of 2012. In this post I measure its speed and compare it to four other computers, modern and ancient.

The Illiac IV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC_IV) was the biggest and baddest supercomputer of its time in the 1970s. It was eventually installed at NASA Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area and was reported to have been 13 times faster than any other computer at that time. Although fast, it was very hard to use and many of the scientists shunned it in favor of more conventional computers. So, it was relatively easy to get access if you could put up with it. As a beginning grad student I had no idea what was smart and what was not, so of course I said “sure” when my advisor asked me to consider using it for my thesis. None-the-less, it was my daily tool for four years and I learned a lot about fluid mechanics and parallel computing.

I have too many computers and they all have disks or SSDs to store my stuff. It’s a pain to keep the versions in order. But it’s easier if you can keep only one copy and all the computers can see it. If you have some old external hard-disks and can spare $35 for a Raspberry Pi single board computer, it’s easy to build a “Network Attached Storage” (NAS) . It serves files up to any computer. For example it’s now the place that I keep my music library and it serves my tunes up to my Raspberry Pi streaming computer attached to my stereo. Go here and scroll to the bottom for more detail and instructions on how to build.