Finally my Turing Pi 2 arrived and I couldn’t be more excited! This bad boy has 4 slots for compute modules, and integrated network switch, a BMC running Linux (how cool is that!) and exposes M.2 NVME slots for each of the compute nodes. And all of this as a mini ITX cluster board.

One evening later I’ve plugged all my compute nodes (I have one 😅) into the board and am having now a compute cluster right next to my desk.

Don’t plug a CR2032 battery in

The onboard real-time clock (RTC) is driven by a CR1220 (for Turing Pi V2.4). It ships with an adapter, which is in the CR2032 slot - Since I didn’t had a CR1220 at home but a CR2032 I removed the adapter and put a CR2032 into the holder.

Don’t do this, the board won’t be able to boot! Took me almost an hour to figure that out 😅

See the battery in there? Nope, that shouldn’t be the case. You should use the provided adapter and a CR1220. Don’t be me, and try to be clever. Or do what you want. I’m not your mom.

THIS.IS.AWESOME

Now the CM4 runs openSUSE Leap 15.5 and it purrs like a happy kitty. So far it runs a plain simple nginx server, serving a nice static page. This is going to become mightier over time, for now I have what I wanted and am really happy that it works so nicely out of the box.

The next level of awesomeness will be a Turing Pi RK1 Compute module (Pre-order is available now). They come with up to 32 GiB RAM and are based on the Rockchip RK3588. I’m expecting performance similar to a modern Intel Celeron with this chip, but only time will tell.

For now I just wanted to say that this bad boy is awesome. I’m really excited and happy with it 😀.