perfSONAR on Low Cost Nodes

A number of folks in the perfSONAR community have been experimenting with running perfSONAR on low cost (less than $150) hardware such as the Raspberry Pi, the cubox, and the Liva. In general this works well, with some caveats.

1. Time sync issues: Some low end hardware have issues with clock drift, which impacts latency measurements.
2. CPU performance issues: current ARM processors are not able to push TCP much more than about 300Mbps. Celeron processors do better, and get around 930Mbps.
3. None of these devices are powerful enough to run the full perfSONAR toolkit which install a measurement archive.

The perfsonar-testpoint bundle can be used to install everything you need to add a low-end node to a centrally managed test mesh with a central measurement archive.

System Requirements

Most of these low cost devices seem to work best running Ubuntu. The perfsonar-testpoint bundle works on Ubuntu 12 and 14. We provide compatible Debian packages for 4 different hardware architectures:

• 32-bit (i386)
• 64-bit (amd64)
• ARMv4t and up (armel)
• ARMv7 and up (armhf)

We recommend a device with at least 1MB of RAM and 16MB of disk. At this point in time, the most extensively tested platform in this category is the $100 Liva.

Installation Instructions

See instructions for installing the perfsonar-testpoint bundle: Installation on Debian

Support

Support for low cost node installations is provided by the perfSONAR community through the usual communication channels.