Keen on Kubernetes? It has been a long wait, but the Turing Pi 2 is finally close to shipping.

A year and a bit after the [1]Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 shipped, and one of our [2]crafty commenters noticed that a new version was coming, the [3]Turing Pi 2 board is close enough to shipping that zealous Pi-related YouTuber Jeff Geerling has got his [4]hands on one .

Unlike the [5]Alftel Seaberry we covered last month , this is not a Pi CM4 in a mini-ITX case. No, it's four Pi CM4s in a mini-ITX case. No need to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these: it's specifically designed to build such a thing, or more contemporaneously, a Kubernetes cluster of them.

[6]

Turing Pi 2

The Turing 2 is the successor to the Turing 1, which let you cluster up to seven Pi 1, Pi 3 or Pi 3+ Compute Modules. The snag was that even the CM3+ was a bit feeble, with only a gig of RAM and four 1.2 MHz Cortex-A53 cores. Even seven of them wouldn't form a very powerful cluster. Although it holds fewer boards, the Turing 2 is significantly beefier, with two Mini-PCIe slots, two SATA III ports, 12Gbps of interconnect bandwidth and a managed switch to manage intra-cluster communications.

A less apparent advantage over the Turing Pi 1 is greater choice of boards. While the older Pi Compute Modules presented an SoDIMM-style edge connector, the CM4 needs a carrier board. But that means that a number of devices with compatible connectors are available, so that the Turing Pi 2 isn't limited to Pi Compute Modules. You can also use the [7]Nvidia Jetson Nano , [8]Pine64 SOQuartz , or [9]Radxa ROCK3 Computing Module .

[10]Want to buy your own piece of the Pi? No 'urgency' says Upton of the listing rumours

[11]Seaberry carrier board turns a Raspberry Pi into a desktop PC with 11 PCIe slots

[12]Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

[13]Linux 5.16 to bring mainline support to Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module – and the nifty devices built around it

This isn't a desktop computer, and although you could certainly use it as one, it would be a waste of the device's potential. But it will make an fine inexpensive local K8s cluster, or as the manufacturers [14]suggested back when it was announced, for prototyping workloads to deploy onto Amazon's [15]ARM-powered AWS Graviton service .

You could be forgiven for forgetting, but there's more to life than Linux, of course. There are an assortment of other OSes for the Pi hardware, and with a little adaption, some would be ideal for this. There's a preliminary but [16]usable port of the [17]newly independent (from [18]Nokia's Bell Labs ) [19]Plan 9 for the Pi 4. The successor to Plan 9, Inferno, is also [20]cluster-capable , and there's an existing, lavishly documented [21]RasPi port of that too. Some assembly required, though.

[22]

Looking for an idea for a radical tech startup? Port Google's [23]Gvisor onto Plan 9's [24]APE to make a super-lightweight K8s killer. Your correspondent just asks for a 1 per cent cut. ®

Get our [25]Tech Resources



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/pi_compute_module_4/

[2] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/10/19/pi_compute_module_4/#c_4131371

[3] https://turingpi.com/

[4] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/turing-pi-2-4-raspberry-pi-nodes-on-mini-itx-board

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/seaberry_rpi_carrier_board/

[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/12/02/turingpi2.jpg

[7] https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit

[8] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz

[9] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock3/CM3

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/29/pi_listing/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/seaberry_rpi_carrier_board/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/18/48tb_rapsberry_pi_nas/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/09/linux_pi_compute/

[14] https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-2-announcement/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/01/aws_reinvent_graviton_3/

[16] https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T0178132f3d2ed689/plan9-on-raspberry-pi-400

[17] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/24/bell_labs_transfers_plan9pto_foundation/

[18] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/15/nokia_to_buy_alcatel_lucent_for_156_billion/

[19] https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/download/

[20] http://debu.gs/entries/inferno-part-2-let-s-make-a-cluster

[21] http://lynxline.com/projects/labs-portintg-inferno-os-to-raspberry-pi/

[22] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YalQHbalhG82hJqLmfu-AwAAABc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[23] https://github.com/google/gvisor

[24] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape

[25] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/