CloudI running on single board ARM-based computer

[bruce kissinger]

I recently purchased a small single board computer (Odroid C1) that has a 4 core ARMv7 processor.  This single board computer is low priced (approx. $35 US) but quite powerful.

I was curious to see how CloudI would run in an environment like this and overall I have been very pleased.  I installed the ARM versions of Ubuntu 14.04, Erlang, and CloudI 1.4.0.  The installation was straightforward and it was fun to see the single board computer automatically join the CloudI cluster with my other servers and start to exchange messages.

I have not done extensive benchmarking yet, but so far the results are very promising. 

 

The Odroid C1 has very modest power requirements and I am planning on using the Odroid C1 in a sailboat.

 

 

 

[Michael Truog]

That should also mean that everything is ok running on the Raspberry Pi 2 which has similar technical specifications (and a similar price).  Though the Odroid C1 hardware looks better by comparison (e.g., http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-odroid-c1-development-boards-comparison/).  Thank you for mentioning this.

 

 

 

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[bruce kissinger]

On Wednesday, February 11, 2015 at 11:56:59 AM UTC-6, Michael Truog wrote:

On 02/11/2015 06:24 AM, bruce kissinger wrote:

I recently purchased a small single board computer (Odroid C1) that has a 4 core ARMv7 processor.  This single board computer is low priced (approx. $35 US) but quite powerful.

I was curious to see how CloudI would run in an environment like this and overall I have been very pleased.  I installed the ARM versions of Ubuntu 14.04, Erlang, and CloudI 1.4.0.  The installation was straightforward and it was fun to see the single board computer automatically join the CloudI cluster with my other servers and start to exchange messages.

I have not done extensive benchmarking yet, but so far the results are very promising. 

 

The Odroid C1 has very modest power requirements and I am planning on using the Odroid C1 in a sailboat.

That should also mean that everything is ok running on the Raspberry Pi 2 which has similar technical specifications (and a similar price).  Though the Odroid C1 hardware looks better by comparison (e.g., http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-odroid-c1-development-boards-comparison/).  Thank you for mentioning this.

 In my opinion, CloudI is ideal for small environments like this compared to other cloud frameworks because:

• You don't need a virtual machine environment
• CloudI and the components that it uses have a low memory footprint and doesn't consume much of the limited CPU resources
• General simplicity of installation and management.  For example, the ability of Erlang to detect when nodes join or leave the cluster makes it very nice from an Admin standpoint.

[Michael Truog]

On 02/11/2015 12:29 PM, bruce kissinger wrote:

On Wednesday, February 11, 2015 at 11:56:59 AM UTC-6, Michael Truog wrote:

On 02/11/2015 06:24 AM, bruce kissinger wrote:

I recently purchased a small single board computer (Odroid C1) that has a 4 core ARMv7 processor.  This single board computer is low priced (approx. $35 US) but quite powerful.

I was curious to see how CloudI would run in an environment like this and overall I have been very pleased.  I installed the ARM versions of Ubuntu 14.04, Erlang, and CloudI 1.4.0.  The installation was straightforward and it was fun to see the single board computer automatically join the CloudI cluster with my other servers and start to exchange messages.

I have not done extensive benchmarking yet, but so far the results are very promising. 

 

The Odroid C1 has very modest power requirements and I am planning on using the Odroid C1 in a sailboat.

That should also mean that everything is ok running on the Raspberry Pi 2 which has similar technical specifications (and a similar price).  Though the Odroid C1 hardware looks better by comparison (e.g., http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-odroid-c1-development-boards-comparison/).  Thank you for mentioning this.

 In my opinion, CloudI is ideal for small environments like this compared to other cloud frameworks because:

• You don't need a virtual machine environment
• CloudI and the components that it uses have a low memory footprint and doesn't consume much of the limited CPU resources
• General simplicity of installation and management.  For example, the ability of Erlang to detect when nodes join or leave the cluster makes it very nice from an Admin standpoint.

I agree.  Erlang will keep threads sleeping when CloudI isn't keeping them busy, so the power consumption will stay as low as possible, since Erlang was designed for embedded applications.  I bought 4 Odroid C1s to get a cluster of them running for testing.  It will be interesting to see their performance combined with low power consumption.

[Douglas Potter]

Any update on C1s and their performance/stablity? How is cloudi performing on them? Thanks

[bruce kissinger]

Douglas,

I have one C1 that has been up for 60 days continuously with no issues.  It's running Ubunutu 14.04 with an SD card and a USB drive is attached for additional storage.  The C1 is running CloudI and is part of a two-node cluster.  Both the C1 and CloudI seem rock solid.

I did some performance testing when I first started using the C1 mostly to test the cluster performance and see how CloudI would balance the load.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure that my performance tests would mean much to you or would be re-produceable.  I did read a month or so ago some detailed performance testing between the C1 and a Raspberry PI + (?), but don't recall the URL. 

Bruce

[Michael Truog]

On 04/16/2015 03:57 AM, Douglas Potter wrote:

Any update on C1s and their performance/stablity? How is cloudi performing on them? Thanks

I got 4 Odroid C1s with Ubuntu 14.04 on SD cards running with CloudI 1.4.0 and I plan to update them to CloudI 1.5.0 later this week.  I have ran the integration tests and they work without problems, though I needed to break up the single configuration file with all the integration tests due to the memory consumption exceeding what was available on the Odroid C1.  I have used the LAN multicast automatic node discovery in CloudI with the 4 Odroid nodes without any problems.

Each Odroid C1 I setup has a 16x2 LCD display and the source code for driving the display as a CloudI service is at https://github.com/okeuday/odroid_display .  I also did a graphical demo that is meant to be mainly educational that displays CloudI service requests as UTF8 fish within each LCD display, so you can see the service requests within the local node and when it is being sent within a remote node.  That is at https://github.com/okeuday/odroid_fish (the README contents includes an animated image to show what it looks like).  I have kept CloudI running on all 4 Odroid C1s for at least 10 days without seeing any problems.

I will do some loadtesting of an Odroid C1 (similar to what is at https://github.com/CloudI/loadtests) along with other testing (like usage of cloudi_service_request_rate (in src/tests/request_rate/src)), but I have not gotten to that yet.

Best Regards,
Michael

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[Douglas Potter]

Thanks for the info. I hope to pick up a few C1s soon. /Douglas