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Raspberry Pi Server Mark III
- andreareina 6y agoVery cool. Do I understand correctly that there's no traditional backplane on this, power and data are both provide via ethernet?
- thetanil 6y agoThe Pi does not do poe natively. POE is available as a hat, but I have not seen one for the Pi4 yet. The hats are nearly as expensive as the Pi itself.
- GeertJohan 6y agoI'm using the existing PoE hat on several Pi4's in a production environment and it works great. Never had shutdowns or issues with power. Note that I'm not drawing extra power from any of the USB ports, so perhaps the existing PoE hat isn't sufficient when you have USB devices attached to the pi4.
- thetanil 6y agoGood to know. I couldn't see any reason that they wouldn't work for a Pi4, but I couldn't find a single manufacturer that said Pi4 was actually supported.
- andreareina 6y agoHat on the official site [1] explicitly says the 4B is supported. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/
- jsjohnst 6y agoThe PoE Hats are $15-30 on Amazon. That makes the most expensive one 30% of the price of a Pi4 8gb.
- thetanil 6y agoRunning a 6 node cluster of Pi4s at home now. Did some benchmarks. Long story short. USB thumb drive boot disks are better performance and cheaper than SD cards. Fans are completely unnecessary on a Pi4 with an aluminum heat shield style "case". They do run hotter than with a fan, but they will not be heat throttled with recent firmware.
- thetanil 6y agoExample case which does away with the need for fans is: https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Computer-Aluminum-Compatible/dp/B07VD568FB https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Computer-Aluminum-...
- morganvachon 6y agoI like this one, a little more expensive but makes the Pi into a NUC style SFFPC: https://www.waveshare.com/pi4-case-argon-one.htm https://www.waveshare.com/pi4-case-argon-one.htm Edit to add the fan is optional, so it can run fanless with no throttling.
- thetanil 6y agolooks cool, and the breakout board is nice, but they don't show how it attaches to the pi. it's aluminum yeah, but does it actually do anything for heat dissipation?
- thinkmassive 6y agoScroll down that page, there’s a photo and description... “The Extension Pillars Makes The Aluminum Case Become A Big Heatsink”
- NegativeLatency 6y agoThat’s good value with the 2 hdmi adapters
- NortySpock 6y ago
- amelius 6y agoIf only there was a standard way of communicating the cost-effectiveness of these things ...
- djsumdog 6y agoPoE Ethernet would mean just one cable to each device. Hmm ... seems like you can also network boot them over DHCP/TFTP: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net_tutorial.md https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
- luto 6y agokeep in mind that PoE requires an additional PoE hat. That adds another 20$ to the bill for each Pi. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14882 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14882
- jojobas 6y agoSurely one could make do with passive heatsinks on the Pis and use the back coolers?
- thetanil 6y agoPosted before I saw this comment. Yes passive cooling is fine with recent firmware and a good heatsink case. I have stress tested with the following case for hours with all cores pegged at 100% and there is no CPU throttling with passive cooling. They do run hotter, but they do not throttle. Old firware and bad cases will though. https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Computer-Aluminum-Compatible/dp/B07VD568FB https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Computer-Aluminum-...
- jojobas 6y agoYou wouldn't need that much in their case (sorry) as they have through flow.
- fuzzy2 6y agoThat may be difficult with the HATs on every Pi. They look like they limit airflow a lot.
- jojobas 6y agoNothing a clever duct couldn't fix.
- OJFord 6y agoThe official PoE 'hat' (add-on module) comes with that fan, I believe that's what's shown.
- jojobas 6y agoThis hat seems to be built for a fanless case. Pretty sure a heatsink protruding through the hat orifice would be enough in their case design.
- 6y ago
- th3h4mm3r 6y agoWhat could you do with a similar setup? I mean: what's the purpose and/or the advantages compared to a "classical" solution ?
- canofbars 6y agoIts cool and fun and teaches you a skill at a low price point. There is essentially no functional reason to do this over a single high power server unless for some reason you need a bunch of ARM servers for something.
- OJFord 6y agoAll fourteen Pis, even v4s (which are significantly hungrier), would be lower power (as in electrical draw) than even a feeble (as in compute power) traditional machine. If you can distribute your workload (or it's not intensive anyway), i.e. having no single machine with a faster processor, then I think it's a good choice, cheaper to run. Edit: I'm happy to be corrected if down-voters would like to reply... A Pi 4 draws 6-7W at full load. A former desktop PC turned server likely idles over 100W. They're different beasts, so I'm not saying 'a Pi is better than a PC', I'm saying 'if your load could also be handled by a (bunch of) Pi(s), then all else being equal that might be better than the PC'. Of course all else is never equal, ymmv, you may already have the old PC, you may need very many Pis, so even if pennies cheaper to run it might take years and years to break even on the Pi acquisition cost.
- scns 6y agoDid not downvote but desktops idle way below 100w.
- OJFord 6y agoIdle as in powered on, not sleeping, just 'no' workload? I stand corrected if so, I didn't realise that was the case. I also like the idea of having an easy homogeneous setup, each Pi having one disk, vs. my alternative (old PC parts) being something like '4 SATA ports on this one, and 6 on that one, but one's broken, less one on each for the boot disk' - I quite like the idea of having a bunch of Pis, and one image that I apply to all of them, which can include details like /dev/sda being its only data disk. That's not really a functional advantage, just appealing for keeping it simple to come back to and remember/understand how I set it up when I need to tweak something (and really easy to add another one increasing available cpu/ram/disk).
- throwaway4good 6y agoLooks like fun ... but I am getting the new Mac Mini.
- throwaway4good 6y agoThanks for the deserved downvotes. But in terms for actual cost and performance; how does this compare in terms of peak performance, power consumption and actual total cost to mass produced quality hardware like the Apple Mac Mini? I don't the actual numbers but I have the feeling it won't fare that well.
- Tepix 6y agoFor starters it has 14x 8GB RAM, 7TB SSD, 14x GBit and 14x4 A72 cores. Not too shabby.
- throwaway4good 6y agoFor practical purposes 8 high performance cores will be much more performant that 56 cores with lower performance; in particular if the cores are spread over 14 physical machines.
- rovr138 6y agoThat depends on the task.
- throwaway4good 6y agoI challenge you to find a single application where a setup of 14 raspberry pi's will beat the new mac mini.
- AlexSW 6y agoSomething IO-bottlenecked maybe?
- intricatedetail 6y agoI tried to setup something like this, but let's be frank. The performance of this thing makes this largely pointless. I was able to learn much more by setting up virtual machines and configuring them into a cluster. Only advantage of RPi cluster is that you can physically pull the Ethernet plug and test the failures. But that's more like a "fun" factor rather that utility.
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- ZoomStop 6y agohttps://archive.vn/sVYW3 https://archive.vn/sVYW3 The HN hug is strong this morning
- bufferoverflow 6y agoCan someone explain what the point is? Can't you just gets a multicore xeon off eBay really cheap and get more performance for less money?
- thetanil 6y agocloud style microservice architectures. saves a lot of power and no single node is carrying all the weight. distributed computing is scalable. 1 big xeon is not.
- ak39 6y agoThis is so exciting. Is this type of "movement" (trend) likely to see data centers coming back on premises for enteprise markets? (ie. back from cloud)
- make3 6y agoI don't think this will have (or is meant to have) any effect on professional applications. This is just for the educational and cool factor.
- ak39 6y agoRight now, yeah. But if this tech trend (miniature, low power, cheap, commodity) continues and we can run our apps on them ... it might be a game changer. No?
- Galanwe 6y agoHu no. "Low power" , "cheap" and "commodity" already describes retail computers since almost 30 years. Why do so many people want to see a higher purpose in any fun experiment? Can't it just be that, a fun and cool hobby project?
- opheliate 6y agoJust for a different perspective, I grew up in a very low income household, and the Pi was the only computer I was able to convince my mum to get me as an early teenager. "Cheap" is relative, and I disagree that the Pi wasn't a big step forward in terms of price on the very low-end.
- pjc50 6y agoCloud vs. datacenter is entirely about administration, rather than hardware.
- kyran_adept 6y agoI would say it's more about elasticity and the ability to scale horizontally if you take the minimum amount of precautions when designing your app.
- exabrial 6y agoThat is a damn good looking 3d print wow. My only beef with RPIs as servers is disk I/O is terrible. If that's been solved, I'd love to know! If the SOC has PCI-E lanes that were accessable externally I feel like the server side would really take off
- rwmj 6y agoThe Compute Modules have (optionally I think) eMMC which is not especially fast, but fast enough and appears much more reliable than SD cards. The RPi 4 also has support for USB 3 disks using UAS. I've attached a couple of SSDs to mine. https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running-fedora-32/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running...
- rixrax 6y agoI think recent firmwares would allow Sd-card-less pxe boot. I was wondering the other day if you could then run the whole system from RAM disk only and/or maybe mount volumes via iSCSI from SAN (keeping in mind limitations of RPi 1Gb nic). Edit: someone has done this already. Of course! :) ( https://tech.xlab.si/blog/pxe-boot-raspberry-pi-iscsi/ https://tech.xlab.si/blog/pxe-boot-raspberry-pi-iscsi/ )
- 0x426577617265 6y agoCould also use the sd card to boot only, then pass everything to a USB3 SSD.
- xtat 6y agoor just boot usb :)
- kingosticks 6y agoYes, with the compute module. https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/ https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/
- anoncow 6y agoThe Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with support for PCI Express will be ideal for something like this.
- pknopf 6y agoPi's don't last as long as traditional hardware, but if you are running a self-healing cluster of machines, why wouldn't you use this for production environments?
- 3327 6y agoWhat is a use case for this if any?
- metalliqaz 6y agoThere isn't one. For actually delivering an application, a traditional server is better in every way, unless your application is so small that you are wasting your hardware and get killed on power costs. It's more or less the same as the people in /r/homelab who have full server racks in their basements but never do anything with most of their eBay servers other than install CentOS on them. At least those can serve movies via Plex, though.
- pat2man 6y agoI mean there are probably a few super edge cases for something like this. A digital art display, or theater production for instance. Something you can custom 3d print yourself is just about perfect for that.
- gtvwill 6y agolol brrrrt. Actually there's heaps of cases. Traditional servers are large, power hungry and generally 10-100x the compute power most jobs need if you buy a piece of hardware for a site. Traditional server also requires expensive monkey like me to service. RPI rack on other hand. plug and play. Cheap as chips to keep failover as you can keep backup rigs in a cupboard. It doesnt require expensive monkey to unplug bits. Most sites I serve have minimal if any internet at all. So cloud compute not an option everything has to be done on-site. RPI is perfect. It has more than enough grunt, costs bugger all, performance is rock solid.
- metalliqaz 6y agoDisks, man. Where are your disks??? Compute by itself is next to useless for anything serious. You need data. What do you need a compute node for if you don't have any data? You could just do it client-side in the browser.
- AceJohnny2 6y agoImagine a Beowulf cluster of-- shit, am I too late?
- sitzkrieg 6y agomaking something like this with eg, amlogic socs, would be significantly faster and require no fans and less power. it would be cool to see someone do something like this with the not terrible rpi broadcom chips
- kodisha 6y agoHow "fast" and "strong" can those servers be? Compared to something we all know, e.g. MBP 16" 2019, how does this rack of Raspberry Pi's stack up?
- kodisha 6y agoI'm just trying to understand the power of those machines compared to the only piece of equipment I daily use and can compare to. I know it can be like comparing apples to oranges but I was just curious how fast this can be.
- amself 6y agoThe best Raspberry Pi available right now is a bit faster than a modern entry-level PC. It has 4 ARM cores running at 1.5 GHz and 8 gigs of RAM.
- jrockway 6y agoThat is not true at all. For compute, it's about 5x slower than the cheapest Intel processor you can buy. It's certainly much better than the original Raspberry Pi (which felt like a 486), but it is not using recent technology and it just doesn't compare to what is available today. It is for projects where you would normally use a microcontroller, but want HDMI and Linux out of the box. People using the Pi for art projects, signage, dashboards, controlling their sprinkler system, etc. have the right idea. People using them to serve interactive traffic are going to have a bad time. They are really, really slow.
- Merocle 6y agoHi! thanks for posting my project here ) I will be glad if you subscribe to my instagram https://www.instagram.com/uptime.lab/ https://www.instagram.com/uptime.lab/ I don't sell anything, but feedback is very important for me
- tlbsofware 6y agoJust did, always like subscribing to pages that add a bit of education to my feed
- varispeed 6y agoWhy there is so much love for such project where someone connected a couple of ready made things (maybe except the case) and everyone gets excited?
- syntaxing 6y agoThe hotswap 3D printed mechanism is pretty neat (reminds me of the swappable harddrive days). As for Rpi clusters, its just a neat idea to think about. It's not entirely trivial hardware or software wise to load balance 14 Rpis for "one purpose".
- fartcannon 6y agoWhy are pop music, fast food and sitcoms so extremely popular? They maximize a small amount of appeal across a broad group. Every step deeper, or obscure loses you more and more mass appeal. Therefore, projects with high max appeal make it to the top of lists like HN. It's no conspiracy.
- varispeed 6y agoPop music is extremely difficult to make although the end product looks "simple".
- xtat 6y agoYou are describing the elements of most of the best ideas in history.
- paco3346 6y agoI think for me there's just a hobby/cool factor. I have no intention to build one nor can I think of a good use case but it's still neat to look at someone else's handiwork.
- meghdeepr 6y agoWhat are some use cases for this ?
- hifly 6y agoIt’s not the same money, but I like pcengines apu for this. Lots of intel Ethernet, mpcie msata, etc. Intel amd64 makes dev simple
- urza 6y agoHow it started: Lets create a small cheap computer that poor kids can use for education. How its going: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III