There’s nothing novel here. People have “clustered” PS3’s and Nintendo’s, for God’s sake. Clustering alone does not a supercomputer make.
HPC....high performance computing, aka “supercomputing”....a term no one in the industry uses any more, by the way....is 99% used for sophisticated modeling. Clusters are monstrous modeling machines. Weather models, nuke models, modeling protein folding, modeling oil reservoirs....you name it. They use the latest, greatest, hottest, fastest processors on the market. They use Infiniband as the communication fabric; ultra-low latency, super high message rates, performance at scale (to thousands of nodes....a node=a server), etc. These are big, expensive beasts that do remarkable calculations for remarkable science. For a bunch of dweebs to wire up some toy computers and claim it’s a “supercomputer” is worse than laughable.....it’s an insult to the intelligence to anyone in the field; anyone who uses this technology to solve huge, real world problems.
In sum.....it’s a pathetic little joke to get their sad little names in the paper.
You know, I was not going to reply to your post, agreeing with it completely ... “There’s nothing novel here.”
Reading it a second time on my “ping list”, though, inspires me to note one thing that is really novel: that the cost of this Raspberry Pi unit dramatically lowers the cost of the effort to create a cluster like this. That is clearly novel, I believe.