Use of low-end single board computer clusters to prototype cluster administration and benchmarking

Single board computers can be connected as a cluster to be used for academic and scientific projects as well as a test bed for installations on large data center clusters. These clusters offer a low-cost alternative for prototyping cluster administration and benchmarking for bigger clusters. In this poster, we propose a cluster using four Radxa X2L single computer boards, designating one of the boards as the head node and the rest as compute nodes and integrate the software operational steps that are used to support large data center clusters into this single board clusters. Provisioning of the cluster is done using Warewulf while working closely with Warewulf developers to install the latest version and test it for any bugs. Furthermore, we install software, such as Slurm and Spack, and run a project that requires Open MPI showing the ability of the cluster to carry out parallel operations.