Bitluni, a famous DIY gadget YouTuber, has built his own RISC-V megacluster with a “compact” design and some very interesting features.
Apparently, you can use RISC-V to build your own megaclusters. Make sure to manage your bus connections correctly.
DIY examples, especially those centered around the technology industry, are fun to watch because they show the untapped potential of a particular product or device, in this case the RISC-V architecture itself. Now, Bitluni's experiment here is not straightforward, as it requires dealing with multiple superclusters.
His idea was to house 16 of these superclusters in a single interface, but later he could no longer manage them, so he created his own “cluster blade” with two microcontrollers on the board. We designed and managed one supercluster with each microcontroller on top of it. that. He managed to give each supercluster a bus interface through his cluster blades.
Each cluster blade has two CH32V203 microcontrollers, and Bitluni combined eight of them to form one large uniform layer. The assembly process included soldering each microcontroller to the circuit board and installing GPIO pins to begin the testing phase of the design.
Despite a rigorous thought process, Bitluni encountered a major design flaw. He missed the internal clock source, causing the LEDs installed to indicate functionality to flash in random, uncertain patterns. After playing around with the program and debugging bus synchronization, Bitluni arrived at the desired functionality in his DIY cluster.
The whole building process was very interesting and Bitluni's dedication was a lot of fun to watch. Although he wasn't motivated by the DIY project, he certainly seemed determined. Ultimately, his huge cluster housed 256 of his RISC-V-based microcontrollers, and he was able to operate at a single-core frequency of 14.7 GHz!