BitScope Cluster Blade

Cluster Blade is BitScope's next-generation industrial deployment solution for Raspberry Pi. It is a significantly more powerful sibling to the popular Blade Quattro. The new model enables the creation of scaleable cost-effective industrial Cluster, Edge and IoT applications, accelerating digital transformation across a range of industries.

Cluster Blade more than doubles the power of its predecessor, adding a full function control plane and active cooling system to turn the latest Raspberry Pi, with its 64-bit kernel running in 8G of RAM and booting over the network into the most powerful SBC cluster solution available.

Intended for use with the 2GB, 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4, it enables the construction of completely automomous clusters cabable of "stand-alone hands-free remote operation". For the first time is is possible to both develop and deploy scalable industrial Edge/IoT applications on a single plug-and-play hardware platform; Cluster Blade and Raspberry Pi.

The solution combines Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 5.0 and the full set of standard serial interfaces of Raspberry Pi 4 with Cluster Blade's power, mounting, cooling and control solutions. The combination can serve as an Edge Cluster in an IoT or AI network, a data aggregator for a networks of even to build out lower-cost sensor arrays. Each node offers a quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor running at 1.5GHz with up to 8GB RAM and high speed USB3 and Network I/O. Solutions built with this platform will be able to perform sophisticated local processing, reducing upstream bandwidth and helping to address privacy concerns, especially in distributed machine-learning applications.

BitScope Blade solutions are used in a broad range of research, industrial and commercial contexts from Los Alamos National Laboratories, Microsoft Research to T-Mobile and universities around the world, from education, process monitoring and control to I/O intensive applications such as 3D photogrammetry, 5G test platforms and radio server arrays. Their popularity results from a winning combination of low cost, high reliability, flexible deployment and the embrace of open source software and open standards. As with all BitScope products, a high level of backward compatibility facilitates migration of existing Blade powered systems to the new model.

BitScope CEO Bruce Tulloch said: “Our experience building clusters with Raspberry Pi and BitScope Blade led us to develop this highly integrated product to address the emerging need for "turn-key" cluster solutions at the edge. Whether it's a micro-data centre, Edge/IoT cluster, sensor server, AI or Machine Learning platform, the need for easy to use solutions that address the key deployment challenges in industrial applications is clear. With Cluster Blade we aim to provide the best SBC based cluster solution available.”