Only drawback is power consumption. Running a basement/dungeon cluster on surplus (or even brand new) hardware, you're going to end up paying through the nose o

Only drawback is power consumption. Running a basement/dungeon cluster on surplus (or even brand new) hardware, you're going to end up paying through the nose on power bills. With regard to a smoother distribution workflow, Enthought and Anaconda (the latter being my preference) go a long way to ease this. They keep curated package sets of scientific software that are known to work together smoothly, plus include their own package management systems that work well when installed standalone e.g. in a user's home direcctory. You can do this with pip and/or virtualenvs, but it's not as smooth and that is really optimized for a different use case I think.