Cluster Time!

Cluster Time!

I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to hardware and networks. Hey I'm a programmer, I work with software :)

But for some reasons I wanted to make a Java-server-solution at home. I'm not a big fan of having a computer with a loud fan going at it in my living room. So what's the options?

I actually have a mini-ITX motherboard with passive cooling, but the parts have started dying, first the nic and now the display connection.

So what's the current solution for every nerd? Raspberry Pi!

So I went to the local hardware store and bought yet another one of these little cuties. (I have one for streaming media from my NAS, awesome that I can control it via the TV-remote through HDMI).

Rasbian (Debian Wheezy for Raspberry Pi) was the distro of my choice. It has Oracle Java (even the new 8!), It didn't take long to get a Glassfish-server up and running. And with a little wrestling with the router I made so I could reach a website (written in JSP) from the web.

The problem was the CPU. Even with the overclocked option to 900 mhz the cpu got upp to 85-95% with little demand.

So what to do now?

I'm still just in the beginning of my JavaEE learning quest. But one thing that has caught my attention is Wildfly (JBoss newest server). I wanted to see if it was more lightweight then Glassfish (the opinion seems to be that ANYTHING is faster then Glassfish).

But is this nerdy enough? Short answer: Of course not!

So what can I do to make this better? Cluster time!

Cause Raspberries are so cheap I could by several and get them in a cluster, challenge accepted!

I will explain how to actually do this in a future post. I'm missing another stackable chassi (out of stock at the store).

Al the raspberries have heatsinks on them. They (3 soon to be 4) are powered by a usb hub (powered) and is connected to a switch which is connect to the hub.

One of these will be a database-server the other ones will be master and slaves with Wildfly.

Right now to Master-slave is done but have not been tested with any applications.

Coding ahoy!

To be continued...