An Aiyara cluster is a low-powered computer cluster specially designed to process Big Data. The Aiyara cluster model can be considered as a specialization of the Beowulf cluster in the sense that Aiyara is also built from commodity hardware, not inexpensive personal computers, but system-on-chip computer boards. Unlike Beowulf, applications of an Aiyara cluster are scoped only for the Big Data area, not for scientific high-performance computing. Another important property of an Aiyara cluster is that it is low-power. It must be built with a class of processing units that produces less heat.
The name Aiyara originally referred to the first ARM-based cluster built by Wichai Srisuruk and Chanwit Kaewkasi at Suranaree University of Technology. The name "Aiyara" came from a Thai word literally an elephant to reflect its underneath software stack, which is Apache Hadoop.
Like Beowulf, an Aiyara cluster does not define a particular software stack to run atop it. A cluster normally runs a variant of the Linux operating system. Commonly used Big Data software stacks are Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.
A report of the Aiyara hardware which successfully processed a non-trivial amount of Big Data was published in the Proceedings of ICSEC 2014.[1] Aiyara Mk-I, the second Aiyara cluster, consists of 22 Cubieboards. It is the first known SoC-based ARM cluster which is able to process Big Data successfully using the Spark and HDFS stack.[2]
The Aiyara cluster model, a technical description explaining how to build an Aiyara cluster, was later published by Chanwit Kaewkasi in the DZone's 2014 Big Data Guide.[3] The further results and cluster optimization techniques, that make the cluster's processing rate boost to 0.9 GB/min while still preserve low-power consumption, were reported in the Proceeding of IEEE's TENCON 2014.[4]