I supported some large scientific computing clusters when I worked for Digital some years back. Started reading about clusters built from small embedded system boards. Had an idea or two on how to use one for astronomy and a robotics project I want to build so I built one. The idea was to use the built in FFT program in the shaders on the GPU's to do calculations. They aren't well documented and not that fast so I kept looking for something to do the math. Ran across the nvidia Jetson TK1 board. Its a 4 core ARM 32 bit processor with an additional lo power core that is switched in to save power when its not in use. Nothing special the Pi's have basically the same thing. The difference is a K1 kepler GPU with 192 cuda cores on it grafted into the die. 600Gflops of math crunching ability. I want to use FFT's in a way similar to speckle interferometry to negate the seeing conditions and move my focus based on measurements of the star when seeing is subtracted. It will take more than one image 10-20 small frame 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 so it will be quick. Enough for focus since you only need a single star image. Worked out a routine from a tutorial on the mathematica site to take an image and split out all the stars into nice bite sized pieces for the computers to crunch on. So I'm going to use that if I can't get a single star image into the frame. Tested out a dummy 1024x2048 image on a single TK1 last night and it was 39ms to complete the calculations. Fast enough to do the burst. And with both of them active that will be reduced approximately 35-40%. Needless to say I was pleased when I saw the numbers. Another use for the TK-1's I have is to turn one of my mobility scooters into a self driver with voice commands. It will be awesome to have when I go to the races to shoot some pics. The system runs MPICH2 for the cluster software along with Hydra which is part of that package from Argonne Labs here in the states. Pretty much the same software they run at CERN and the other labs with huge clusters. The CFD computers the F1 teams use are just a bunch more K1's Several thousand to be exact. Don't know if the focus stuff will pan out but I have lots of other uses for the equipment so no sweat if it fails miserably
Found the Pi's for 22bucks apiece. 12 for those Drok power supplies. It also functions as a power amp and volt meter.
Griz