Dave5

This a project close to my heart…

For our final project, we built Computron, a parallel computer consisting of Raspberry Pi Picos that communicate over a I2C bus. To demonstrate the power of parallel computation among these devices, the Mandelbrot set is computed across Picos. Every Pico computes a portion of the set, while one is also responsible for projecting the set onto a VGA monitor. This projection unit is special, in that it is the only peripheral device on the I2C bus while every other Pico is an I2C controller. We were able to configure the projection unit to dynamically recognize the number of controllers on the network prior to computation, and to distribute work accordingly without a user informing the network directly. In the end, with eight Picos connected together we were able to achieve about a four-times speedup in computation of the Mandelbrot set compared to computation on a single Pico.

https://ece4760.github.io/Projects/Fall2023/ir93_rak277/index.html