A presentation from Networkshop46.

1. FRµIT: Raspberry Pi
clusters and other
adventures in
networking research
Phil Basford,
University of Southampton

2. >FRµIT Project
>Developing a distributed Raspberry Pi Cluster
>Mountain Sensing
>IPv6 in the Scottish Highlands
>Glacsweb
>Sensor Networks
on/in Icelandic Glaciers
>Erica the Rhino
>IPv6 in a cyber-rhino
Outline

3. >Distributed cluster of Raspberry Pis
>Aiming for around 10,000 nodes
>Testbed to enable Researchers to experiment
without having to build their own cluster
FRµIT
Project
https://fruit-testbed.org/

4. Picycle
FREEPOST PICYCLE

5. Cluster Hardware

6. >Alpine Linux
>Small OS build
>Read only file-system
>Running containers for applications
>Docker
>Singularity
>Investigating using Jisc Assent service
(jisc.ac.uk/assent) for identity management
Software
Architecture

7. Network
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Raspberry Pi Symbol by
https://github.com/rrobinet

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10. >Nodes in limited bandwidth scenarios
>Differential updates
>Investigating peer to peer methods
Update
Mechanism

11. Mountain Sensing https://mountainsensing.org/

12. >6LoWPAN (IPv6 Low-power Wireless Personal
Area Networks)
>COAP (Constrained Application Protocol)
>3km and multiple 1km radio links
>Direct access to nodes from office desk
Mountain
Sensing
Network

13. Mountain
Sensing
Network
Topology
Blue = Gateway
Red = Default Route
Dashed = Intermittent link

14. >Mini-ITX PC
>Satellite internet connection
>No native IPv6
>Uses IPv6 tunnel
>Initially 3rd party (until they shutdown)
>Now running an IPv6 tunnel server at the
University (OpenVPN based)
>Also maintains SSH connections to various
servers with remote SSH port forward back to
gateway
Mountain
Sensing
Backhaul

15. Glacsweb https://glacsweb.org

16. Glacsweb
Topology

17. >Limited number of servers in University had
SSH ports available
>Various single points of failure in departmental
network
>2 possible upload targets
>Offsite server (Primary)
>Department server (Secondary)
Glacsweb
Network
Challenges

18. Erica the Rhino https://www.ericatherhino.org/

19. Erica
Networking Dashed = VPN
Dotted = WiFi

20. >Wide variety of research projects with different
demands from network resources
>Often doing something weird!
>Sometimes require multiple redundant systems
>Used IPv6 heavily
>FREEPOST PICYCLE
Summary

21. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND.
Dr Philip J. Basford
Senior research fellow
P.J.Basford@soton.ac.uk
I have been…
B176/5001, Boldrewood Campus, SO16 7QF
T 023 8059 5449

22. Thank you