This is hard to explain. It all started as a joke. In our lab slang we use the word “raspini” (which has no real meaning in Italian) for referring to the Raspberry Pi. This word sounds very similar to a dialect word (raspèin) that is used in the Italian region in which we work to identify something that is stuck the throat, In other words, it is an irritated throat… and often the first symptom of a cold.

All components have already been shipped to us. We hope to complete the assembly and testing phases in the first months of 2014.

When finished, the raspèin cluster will be on public display at the Corso di Laurea in Ingegneria e Scienze Informatiche, Via Sacchi 3, Cesena.

We're mainly interested in the scalability of distributed algorithms/mechanisms and in the design of fault-tolerant protocols. In other words, the CPU speed is not our main concern, but the number of interconnected devices is. Therefore, for our specific use cases a large number of cheap and slow devices is preferable to a small number of powerful ones.