This 60 Raspberry Pi Farm Simulates Data for a Medical Team

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The right Pi can make a difference.

Arnaud Samson
(Image credit: Arnaud Samson)

A Raspberry Pi in the right place can make a difference—but 60 of them? Arnaud Samson and his team are about to find out how useful a Raspberry Pi farm made with 60 Pis can actually be. The system is used by his team to simulate data from a medical scanner.

Instead of using this massive farm for computing power, the team needed to utilize a large quantity of RJ45 plugs. According to Samson, this is necessary to pull off a simulation of the network load generated by one of their scanners.

To power the farm, the team uses a custom PCB alongside a Corsair gaming power supply.

This project is planned for presentation at the IEEE NPSS Real-Time Conference. Samson stated he may be able to provide a video demonstration or create a post highlighting the project in more detail after the conference.

In the meantime, you can check out this project in the original thread on Twitter. Be sure to follow Samson for updates on this cool Pi farm medical scanner simulator project.

Ash Hill
Ash Hill
Contributing Writer

Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • pavian
    PACS machine with 60 Ethernet ports? Which one? Sounds like a nonsense to me. Everytime when I see posts like this I wonder if ppl needs to use RPi at any cost no matter what or if it has really some potential. I would rather grab one powerful server or some old one (last week I've got 3x R810 for free) and deploy OS and SW once...
    Reply
  • neojack
    i hope they use custom software in order to manage them as a whole !
    Reply
  • pavian
    neojack said:
    i hope they use custom software in order to manage them as a whole !
    Okay and then what. Rewrite every software you need/want to run on this "custom software" managed cluster? How long you'll spent on connecting and then clustering and then tuning those little weak machines? At the end of the day, this is way way more expansive than buying some brand new powerful server(s).

    You need low-budget redundancy? Go with PVE HA cluster without subscription.

    My point is, what is the goal of article like this one? Something like, Hey folks, go and buy more RPis, you can put 3,000 of them together and we'll write article about you. Wake up ppl.
    Reply