Yes, we’re doing it. We’re building (what seems to be) the first distributed Raspberry Pi 2 cloud!

A look back and then a look ahead.

Hi, I’m Jim. I’m going to be running this blog for the next 10 weeks, and it’s going to be an exciting time. A lot has changed since we last posted here, in 2013. A wealth of related projects have been started and finished, papers released and cited. Here’s a selection of those which we thought noteworthy.

In the intervening time, the Pi 2 has also been released. The Pi 2 has a much faster armv7 processor and 1GB RAM. While it’s still far from competing with a desktop PC, it’s a massive improvement from the Pi 1. Because of this, we’ve decided to build and benchmark the second iteration of our favourite cloud. Development has just started, and I will be posting weekly updates. We haven’t settled on a stack yet, but we’re definitely going to be using Docker. We’ll be testing the following distributions:

Arch Linux | Arm for the Pi 2

Ubuntu Mate for the Pi 2

Debian armhf

Raspbian

If you have any suggestions for other distributions, please let us know in the comments. Any chosen distro will need to take full advantage of the Pi 2’s architecture, and supporting Docker out of the box even better (but I don’t mind compiling a kernel or two). If you check back next week I will hopefully have set up and benchmarked all of these, each on a single Pi. This is a great project and once completed it will be a massively useful tool for research and education.

We’re also resurrecting our twitter account, so follow us on that if you haven’t already: @glasgowpicloud.

See you next week.