rasdaman newsletter 06/2026
Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster
The June issue of the GIS Business magazine reports about the creation of a Raspberry Pi cluster in the SkyFed project: How do you integrate 64 Raspberry Pis into a datacube cluster? It describes the logistics involved in creating the cluster under high time pressure.
Recently at Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, the SkyFed project presented a striking demonstrator: 64 Raspberry Pi computers federated using rasdaman's geospatial datacube technology. Co-funded by the EU and Bremen, SkyFed unites rasdaman GmbH, Constructor University and the University of Applied Sciences Bremen with the goal of creating federated datacube services on board of satellites built from off-the-shelf consumer electronics hardware.
The project heralds a "Location-Transparent Earth/Sky Datacube Federation" – satellites, drones, aircraft, cloud systems and data centres operating as a single information space, with AI-supported analysis at the point of data generation. Built on rasdaman, the Big Data engine behind the global EarthServer federation, each Raspberry hosts part of an ERA5 climate datacube which altogether is queryable as a single virtual cube via OGC services, in particular: the WCPS (Web Coverage Processing Service) geo datacube query language. The cluster is additionally linked into the CoperniCUBE datacube service and the aviation weather service of NATO SPS project Cube4EnvSec, demonstrating dual-use interoperability.
Housed in a transparent acrylic enclosure and linked entirely via Wi-Fi – mirroring a satellite swarm – the cluster makes location-transparent federation tangible: many autonomous nodes, one unified data space.
SkyFed, funded by EU EFRE and Bremen, shows that off-the-shelf consumer-grade hardware can deliver standards-based datacube analytics – a step towards European technological sovereignty in Earth observation.
Read the full article: Skyfed: Here Comes a Raspberry Flying
More information: Skyfed
contact: Prof. Dr. Peter Baumann