An experiment in creating clusters and distributing loads with Raspberry Pis

Lead Image © Svetlana Gucalo, 123RF.com

Berry Clusters

The Raspberry Pi makes an ideal LAN server; connect several Rasp Pis and a low-cost root server, and you have a cluster before you know it.

If your project has exhausted the capabilities of a Raspberry Pi, it can be worth your while to connect several of these devices together to make a cluster. Doing so will create new resources and give you an opportunity to learn about techniques for building a computer cluster with a load balancer.

Typically, a cluster is a group of computers that act to guard against an outage or improve the performance of a service. The cluster in this example is made from four Rasp Pis. Three of the diminutive machines run locally with the GlusterFS [1] distributed filesystem (Figure 1), thus combining the read bandwidth of the three devices. The next step involves adding geo-replication with the fourth Raspberry Pi, which the other Rasp Pis can only reach over the Internet.

Each of the individual nodes receives a web server. Finally, a separate web server assumes the task of balancing the load to make the cluster resources available on the network.

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