Capabilities of Raspberry Pi 2 for Big Data and Video Streaming Applications in Data Centres

  • Nick J. Schot
  • Paul J. E. Velthuis
  • Björn F. Postema
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9629)

Abstract

Many new data centres have been built in recent years in order to keep up with the rising demand for server capacity. These data centres require a lot of electrical energy and cooling. Big data and video streaming are two heavily used applications in data centres. This paper experimentally investigates the possibilities and benefits of using cheap, low power and widely supported hardware in the form of a micro data centre with big data and video streaming as its main application area. For this purpose, multiple Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (RPi2)’s have been used in order to build a fully functional distributed Hadoop and video streaming setup that has acceptable performance and extends to new research opportunities. We experimentally validated the new setup to fit in a data centre environment by analysis of its performance, scalability, energy consumption, temperature and manageability. This paper proposes a high concurrency and low power setup in a small 1U form factor with an estimated number of 72 RPi2’s as an interesting alternative to traditional rack servers.

Keywords

Micro data centre Raspberry Pi 2 Benchmarking Hadoop Big data Video streaming Cloud computing 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Marijn Jongerden and Boudewijn Haverkort (both from University of Twente) for their constructive feedback.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Nick J. Schot
    • 1
  • Paul J. E. Velthuis
    • 1
  • Björn F. Postema
    • 1
  1. 1.Centre for Telematics and Information TechnologyUniversity of TwenteEnschedeThe Netherlands

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