Keen on Kubernetes? It has been a long wait, but the Turing Pi 2 is finally close to shipping.

A year and a bit after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 shipped, and one of our crafty commenters noticed that a new version was coming, the Turing Pi 2 board is close enough to shipping that zealous Pi-related YouTuber Jeff Geerling has got his hands on one.

Unlike the Alftel Seaberry we covered last month, this is not a Pi CM4 in a mini-ITX case. No, it's four Pi CM4s in a mini-ITX case. No need to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these: it's specifically designed to build such a thing, or more contemporaneously, a Kubernetes cluster of them.

The Turing 2 is the successor to the Turing 1, which let you cluster up to seven Pi 1, Pi 3 or Pi 3+ Compute Modules. The snag was that even the CM3+ was a bit feeble, with only a gig of RAM and four 1.2 MHz Cortex-A53 cores. Even seven of them wouldn't form a very powerful cluster. Although it holds fewer boards, the Turing 2 is significantly beefier, with two Mini-PCIe slots, two SATA III ports, 12Gbps of interconnect bandwidth and a managed switch to manage intra-cluster communications.

A less apparent advantage over the Turing Pi 1 is greater choice of boards. While the older Pi Compute Modules presented an SoDIMM-style edge connector, the CM4 needs a carrier board. But that means that a number of devices with compatible connectors are available, so that the Turing Pi 2 isn't limited to Pi Compute Modules. You can also use the Nvidia Jetson Nano, Pine64 SOQuartz, or Radxa ROCK3 Computing Module.

This isn't a desktop computer, and although you could certainly use it as one, it would be a waste of the device's potential. But it will make a fine inexpensive local K8s cluster, or as the manufacturers suggested back when it was announced, for prototyping workloads to deploy onto Amazon's ARM-powered AWS Graviton service.

You could be forgiven for forgetting, but there's more to life than Linux, of course. There are an assortment of other OSes for the Pi hardware, and with a little adaption, some would be ideal for this. There's a preliminary but usable port of the newly independent (from Nokia's Bell Labs) Plan 9 for the Pi 4. The successor to Plan 9, Inferno, is also cluster-capable, and there's an existing, lavishly documented RasPi port of that too. Some assembly required, though.

Looking for an idea for a radical tech startup? Port Google's Gvisor onto Plan 9's APE to make a super-lightweight K8s killer. Your correspondent just asks for a 1 per cent cut. ®

Opinion It's the end of the year, when the tradition is to look back at what just happened. Let's not do that. Let's take a step back and look at the wider picture, because while we've been worrying about data breaches and OS updates, we've rather missed the point.

The world is living through an historically great technological revolution as huge as any that has gone before. Farming and settlement turned us from slaves to masters of life support systems. The printing press liberated thought and enabled the Enlightenment and science. The Industrial Revolution linked energy to society.

Now, the information revolution is doing the same for data, putting it to work, putting it in the hands of everyone, upsetting the status quo so fast we can barely see the shapes it makes.

Who, Me? Before one can organise a piss-up in a brewery, one must first get the brewery started. Something a Register reader found difficult in today's Who, Me?

Our tale takes us back to the '80s, the decade of fun. Our brave reader – let's call him "Gareth" – was heading up a team building a state-of-the-art Brewery Process Block.

It was quite the thing to behold. "They literally came from all over Europe to see it," boasted Gareth. The clever modular design meant that bits could start being water tested even if other parts were not quite ready. It was also up and running – handy since a grand opening was planned.

12BoC Every little bit doesn't help in today's edition of our final run of 2021 Borks: The 12 Borks of Christmas.

It is the Hove branch of the UK grocery retailer Tesco feeling the pinch today as a number of Register readers and your correspondent separately spotted the same bit of sick signage outside the store.

Review Smartphones aren't very exciting anymore, but Apple insists its mutually optimised operating system, online services, and proprietary silicon combine to deliver an uncommonly fine experience.

I decided to put that assertion to the test with both an unusual and extreme workload, and with general smartphone tasks.

For the extreme workload I chose to use the iPhone to run Zwift, a cycling simulation game that ingests real-time information about a cyclist's power and cadence, broadcast over Bluetooth, and matches those exertions to simulated speeds in a virtual world.

12BoC We take a trip to the seaside in our 12 Borks of Christmas as a parking machine touchscreen goes rogue... with inevitable consequences.

The fair city of Brighton has many car parks, all of which will charge the visiting motorist an eye-watering premium in return for a few hours of parking.

It appears that one customer has taken advantage of a distressed unit, the touchscreen of which is displaying Microsoft Paint (replete with a bitmap of the local council's logo) rather than the normal extortionate rates expected for a stay in Brighton and Hove.

12BoC Welcome to The Register's Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC), a final festive hurrah for digital signage silage and, behind today's window, a reminder that wherever Windows might turn up, Notepad has always got your back.

Snapped by a keen-eyed Register reader, this ATM outside a branch of UK grocery shop Sainsbury's does not look set to be dispensing cash any time soon. One of a pair, the screen belies the presence of Microsoft's finest within thanks to our old friend, Windows Notepad.

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Twas the night after Christmas, but I felt all alone.

I'd opted for on-call rather than spend it at home.

Paid double to sit idle, my colleagues did say:

Episode 23 It wouldn't be Christmas without the smell of chestnuts on an open fire and the sound of carols in the air …

On Call Welcome to On Call, and a telephone mystery solved only after an innocent party found themselves on the receiving end of a most unexpected conversation.

Our story, from a reader Regomised as "Des", takes place in the closing years of the 20th century and concerns an IVR platform he'd developed.

IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, was the slightly inaccurate name given to the then exciting new technology whereby one might jab digits on one's phone to interact with a system on the other end of the line. Perhaps to leave a voicemail, make an order, or interact with any number of premium services.

The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has concluded the first phase of its efforts to create made-in-Europe chips, an effort it is hoped will reduce reliance on imports, improve sovereign capabilities, and create the continent's first exascale supercomputer.

The EPI’s end-of-year report, published this week, notes a few major achievements, among them delivering the specification of “Rhea”, the first generation of the EPI General-Purpose Processor (GPP) implementation and its future derivates.

Rhea is built on Arm’s Neoverse V1 processor architecture, but it also has 29 RISC-V cores deployed as controllers. Rhea is planned to be deployed in an exascale super in 2023.

Microsoft has revealed a vulnerability in its Azure App Service for Linux allowed the download of files that users almost certainly did not intend to be made public.

Microsoft bills the Azure App Service as just the thing if you want to “Quickly and easily create enterprise-ready web and mobile apps for any platform or device, and deploy them on a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure.”

Note that description does not mention security.

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021