Turing Pi Cluster Board Lets You Make a Raspberry Pi Server Rack

(Image credit: Turing Machines Inc)

The Turing Pi (opens in new tab)cluster board is officially available for preorder from Turing Machines Inc. This Mini-ITX-sized motherboard can support up to seven Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, essentially creating a server rack.

The Turing Pi board has support for the Kubernetes environment. It's ideal for things like machine learning, cloud environments, application testing and serverless stacks. The board features a variety of ports, including an audio jack, HDMI port and a 1 Gbps Ethernet port. It uses a real-time clock (RTC) and cluster management bus (I2C) as well.

(Image credit: Turing Machines Inc)

The Turing Pi cluster board only supports a few specific Raspberry Pi models: the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 1 (opens in new tab), Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (opens in new tab)and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ (opens in new tab). As per the Raspberry Pi Foundation's product descriptions, Compute Modules are like the single-board computers we typically think of when picturing a Pi but in a more flexible form factor targeting industrial applications. 

Turing's Pi cluster board can support up to seven Compute Modules at a time but will work with any number of nodes. Each node is assigned a unique IP address and shares the same 1 Gbps Ethernet port but is limited to 100 Mbps USB speed. The unit can receive power from one of two methods: ATX power supply or 12V.

(Image credit: Turing Machines Inc)

The operating system can be loaded from eMMC storage, an SD card or netboot. You can find more details on setting up the operating system on the official Turing Pi website (opens in new tab)

If you'd like to get your hands on one of these boards, visit the Turing Pi preorder page (opens in new tab) to place an order. The new cluster board is available with a price tag of $189 (€174.41).

Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer at Tom's Hardware US. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.