Doctoral student Amin Amooie and advisor Joachim Moortgat have teamed up to create Buckeye Pi, a platform for students to learn how to develop efficient, scalable computer code for research in the sciences. Their latest demo has 128 circuit boards and 512 processors, making it the most powerful student-built supercomputer ever made from off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi circuit boards. The total cost came in at about $7,500--only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that a typical supercomputer would cost. Moortgat notes: “Obviously, Buckeye Pi will not be competitive with million-dollar computers, but it will allow us to develop and test algorithms quickly and cheaply. Then, we can run a few larger simulations on commercial supercomputers.” 

Last month, Amooie described Buckeye Pi at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans. Amooie and Moortgat's research was also covered by NBC. Learn more here.