MOVERS & SHAKERS
WORDS DOUGLAS ROSS
Douglas Ross meets Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi
Today, there have been over 25 million Raspberry Pi sold worldwide. “We have customers buying tens of thousands of the minicomputers to network together as a training research platform,” Eben explains. “We designed this little machine to go into kids’ bedrooms; we didn’t imagine it would end up being used in high-performance computing research.” The allure of the Raspberry Pi is the unforeseen manifestations that such a simple, programmable computer has produced. For Eben, one of the most interesting adoptions of the platform has been its recent use in high- performance research, as he explains. “Most supercomputers are built of connected medium-performance machines, forming one high- performance machine. Raspberry Pi is nowhere near as powerful as the machines you put into a supercomputer, but if you take a bunch and network them together, you get a device that provides –in a scaled-down way – the development challenges for modern supercomputers. They become great tools for training and experimenting with new approaches.” The Raspberry Pi’s origins are appropriately simple. Noting a marked
s one of the youngest but fastest-evolving industries in the world, digital tech is
catching us all off guard. In fact, we can no longer call it an industry. It permeates our lives and continues to develop in unforeseeable ways. All companies want to be a tech company, and nowhere more so than in Cambridge. Just off Hills Road, a short walk from the Botanic Garden, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was created in 2008 by Eben Upton, who at the time was director of studies in Computer Science at St John’s College. Four years later, the foundation started producing low- cost, programmable minicomputers known as the Raspberry Pi, or Pi for short. A simple circuit board that fits in your hand and can be encased in a plastic shell, the Pi was originally constructed to be an introduction to the fundamentals of computer programming. So why did its release take several years? “I think some of it is about the perils of distraction,” Eben admits. “There were periods in that window where there were so many things to do in each of those areas of academia, business and tech that I found myself distracted. If you have a magpie mind, it’s very easy to never get anything done!” Occupying these very overlapping sectors — academia, business and tech — helped Eben to identify how a non-profit could navigate the various challenges that occupy the terrain and come out with a viable solution to a major problem: tech literacy. But the popularity of the Pi was something that nobody in the foundation predicted.
decrease in student applications for computer science degrees at
The popularity of the Pi was something that nobody in the foundation predicted. Today,
there have been over 25 million sold worldwide"
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ISSUE 01
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