[Radiance-general] Radiance on Raspberry Pi

[Jack de Valpine]

Hey Mark,

Awesome!

-Jack

On 4/20/2013 3:03 PM, Mark Stock wrote:
> For those interested, I built Radiance on a Raspberry Pi yesterday
> (700 MHz single-core ARMv6, 3.5W, 512 MB RAM) and ran the speed test
> from http://markjstock.org/pages/rad_bench.html.
>
> The results are not encouraging, but you don't buy a Raspberry Pi for
> speed. It took 17 hours to finish the rpict portion of the test. The
> best serial time ever recorded was just under 18 minutes on an Intel
> i7-2600K from 1.5 years ago (57x faster). The peak SMP time is 3.5
> minutes, recorded earlier this year (296x faster). The Raspberry Pi's
> time was similar to what we would expect from computers from 2001-2: a
> Pentium II at about 250MHz, or a 400HMz Sun UltraSparc, both which
> regularly sported about 512MB of RAM, but obviously cost about 100x
> more.
>
> 100 Raspberry Pi machines, networked and working in parallel, would
> consume 350W and cost $3500 (not counting networking hardware), both
> numbers in the ballpark of the best current CPU-intensive
> single-workstation systems. Assuming perfect parallelization, it could
> finish in a little over 10 minutes, but a more realistic guess would
> be 15-20 minutes. I'm glad NREL decided to go with the Xeon Phi
> instead of a cluster of RPis.
>
> Maybe I should start a Radiance "speed" test that measures the results
> in Joules instead of seconds.
>
> Mark
>
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