When the ESP32 microcontroller first appeared on the market it’s a fair certainty that somewhere in a long-forgotten corner of the Internet a person said: “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things!”.

Someone had to do it, and it seems that the someone in question was [Kodera2t], who has made a mini-cluster of 4 ESP32 modules on a custom PCB. They might not be the boxed computers that would come to mind from a traditional cluster, but an ESP32 module is a little standalone computer with processing power that wouldn’t have looked too bad on your desktop only in the last decade. The WiFi on an ESP32 would impose an unacceptable overhead for communication between processors, and ESP32s are not blessed with wired Ethernet, so instead the board has a parallel bus formed by linking together a group of GPIO lines. There is also a shared SPI SRAM chip with a bus switchable between the four units by one of the ESp32s acting as the controller.

You might ask what the point is of such an exercise, and indeed as it is made clear, there is no point beyond interest and edification. It’s unclear what software will run upon this mini-cluster as it has so far only just reached the point of a first hardware implementation, but since ESP32 clusters aren’t exactly mainstream it will have to be something written especially for the platform.

This cluster may be somewhat unusual, but in the past we’ve brought you more conventional Beowulf clusters such as this one using the ever-popular Raspberry Pi.