Building a Compute Cluster with the Beagle Bone Black

With a small size, extremely low power consumption and great Linux support, arm based boards are great for developing small projects. The Beagle Bone Black was launched in 2008; Texas Instruments as an open source computer developed the original Beagle Board. It featured a 720 MHz Cortex A8 arm chip and 256MB of memory. The BeagleBoard-xm and Beagle Bone were released in subsequent years leading to the Beagle Bone Black as the most recent release.

Setting up the Cluster

2x beagle bone blacks (Connected to machines)
2x Ethernet cables

With ifconfig change the ip address and Edit  /etc/hostname and place the new hostname in the file.

hostname beaglebone1

127.0.0.1     localhost

192.168.1.51  beaglebone1 (Example)

192.168.1.52  beaglebone2 (Example)

Creating a Compute Cluster With MPI

MPI is a standardized system for passing messages between machines on a network. It is powerful in that it distributes programs across nodes so each instance has access to the local memory of its machine and is supported by several languages such as C, Python and Java. There are many versions of MPI available MPICH is one of them. As a root execute following commands.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gcc

sudo apt-get install libcr-dev mpich2 mpich2-doc

MPI works by using SSH to communicate between nodes and using a shared folder to share data. The first step to allowing this was to install NFS.

Install NFS server on first BBB1 using   # apt-get install nfs-server

Install NFS client second   BBB2 using  # apt-get install nfs-client

Create a directory to be used for MPI on each BBB with mkdir /hpcuser

Synchronise the folders by issuing the command on the master node:

# echo "/hpcuser *(rw,sync)" | sudo tee -a /etc/exports

Mount the master's node on  slave so they can see any files that are added to the master node:

# mount beaglebone1:/hpcuser /hpcuser

create the hpcuser and assign it the shared folder:

# useradd -d /hpcuser hpcuser

To generate a key to use for the SSH communication.

# su - hpcuser

# sshkeygen -t rsa

Testing MPI

Once the machines were able to successfully connect to each other, Write a simple program on the master node.

log in as hpcuser,

create a simple program in its root directory /hpcuser and call it mpi1.c. MPI needs the program to exist in the shared folder so it can run on each machine.

The program below simply displays the index number of the current process, the total number of processes running and the name of the host of the current process. Finally, the main node receives a sum of all the process indexes from the other nodes and displays it:

#include <mpi.h>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])

{

    int rank, size, total;

    char hostname[1024];

    gethostname(hostname, 1023);

    MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);

    MPI_Comm_rank (MPI_COMM_WORLD, &rank);

    MPI_Comm_size (MPI_COMM_WORLD, &size);

    MPI_Reduce(&rank, &total, 1, MPI_INT, MPI_SUM, 0, MPI_COMM_WORLD);

    printf("Testing MPI index %d of %d on hostname %s\n", rank, size, hostname);

    if (rank==0)

    {

        printf("Process sum is %d\n", total);

    }

    MPI_Finalize();

    return 0;

}

Created a file called machines.txt in the same directory and place the names of the nodes in the cluster inside, one per line. This file tells MPI where it should run:

beaglebone1

beaglebone2

compile  the program using mpicc and the test it :

mpicc mpi1.c -o mpiprogram

mpiexec -n 8 -f machines.txt ./mpiprogram

TITLE : INTERAFCING OF STEPPER mOTOR.

OBJECTIVE :

Study of stepper motor interface with BBB.

S/W AND H/W REQUIREMENT :

BBB ,Stepper motor driving circuitry and stepper motor host .

REFERENCES :

•       www.beagleboard.org

THEORY :

A unique type f motor useful for maving things in small increments is a stepper motor. Stepper motors rotate or step from one fixed position to the next. Stepper motors are used in do matrix printers, floppy disk( used to position the read and write head over the desired track ) and to move the pen around on x-y plotters.

                                    Common step sizes for stepper motors range from 9 to 30 degrees.A stepper motor is stepped from one position to the next by changing the currents through the fields in the motor. The two common field connections are reffered to as two phase and four phase

          Step                 Switch

                              SW4   SW3  SW2  SW1

            1                  0       0        1         1

            2                  1       0        0         1

            3                  1       1        0         0

            4                  0       1        1         0

STEP TO DO :

Stepper motor  PIO is connected to BBB board . Connections  are done using 4GPIOs on header p9.

•       Send a rotation patter for the stepper motor.

•       Observe the rotation of the motor.

Interfacing diagram

Program in Python to rotate the stepper motor

import Adafruit_BBIO.GPIO as GPIO

import time

GPIO.setup("P9_11", GPIO.OUT)

GPIO.setup("P9_12", GPIO.OUT)

GPIO.setup("P9_13", GPIO.OUT)

GPIO.setup("P9_14", GPIO.OUT)

while True:

    GPIO.output("P9_11", GPIO.HIGH)

    GPIO.output("P9_12", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_13", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_14", GPIO.LOW)

   time.sleep(0.25)

   GPIO.output("P9_11", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_12", GPIO.HIGH)

    GPIO.output("P9_13", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_14", GPIO.LOW)

   time.sleep(0.25)

   GPIO.output("P9_11", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_12", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_13", GPIO.HIGH)

    GPIO.output("P9_14", GPIO.LOW)

   time.sleep(0.25)

    GPIO.output("P9_11", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_12", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_13", GPIO.LOW)

    GPIO.output("P9_14", GPIO.HIGH)

   time.sleep(0.25)

    GPIO.cleanup()