11 ms·

Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board

206 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

prettyStandard 5y ago
Why do I enjoy these raspberry pi articles so much?
- intrasight 5y ago
  For me it's because of the very idea of a $35 computer that's as powerful as a million dollar computer was when I was at university.
  - daemin 5y ago
    Each one of these Raspberry Pi's is more powerful than the first few computers that I've used and owned. So to have a cluster of them feels like 1990's ultimate power!
Uehreka 5y ago
Every time something like this gets posted on HN, my brain does the same thing: “Neat! I wonder what Jeff Geerling will think of—Oh! This _is_ him!” Keep up the good work, and looking forward to hearing about if you’re able to get those Coral AI TPUs working!
nsky-world 5y ago
We are waited for this for soooo loooong!!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
volfied 5y ago
I am hoping someone can educate me. I do enjoy Jeff's articles and videos, but I fail to see what these could be used for. I concede that this is entirely due to my ignorance.
- somethoughts 5y ago
  I think one thing that would be interesting would be a fully native build environment and full native development tools for the Raspberry Pi. Building Ubuntu OS images from scratch on a Raspberry Pi server equivalent machine would be very interesting. For the non-embedded firmware engineer it is a-trivial to wrap your head around initially w.r.t. cross compiling Linux distros using ARM compilers running on an x86 host.
- mataug 5y ago
  There are a lot of industrial and commercial applications. My interest though is in running a low power cluster at home for testing random applications that I build. For example I'm writing an app for hosting documentation for household items and integrating it with a label printer. It would be great if I could host this and many other applications locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing together a bunch of raspberry pis with a network switch, or hosting it on a cloud service
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > It would be great if I could host this and many other applications locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing together a bunch of raspberry pis with a network switch, or hosting it on a cloud service. Pardon my ignorance, but why couldn't you run this on a NUC or a NAS? Do you need HA for testing random apps? Or is it just that this is more fun and a learning experience?
    - cameron_b 5y ago
      My interest in this space is in the opportunity to test assumptions when scaling wide. Those of us without University compute access or Cloud budgets ( like neighborhood STEM classes ) can plunk down for a desktop learning environment that can run k8s or slurm and you can learn / teach MPI programming patterns with hands-on, and minimal risk.
    - mataug 5y ago
      Yes a NUC or NAS could do the job as well, so my interest is more of a fun learning experience.
xanaxagoras 5y ago
Jeff Geerling is one of the best tech Youtube channels out there
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Red Shirt Jeff Geerling though? Still one of the best, let's be real.
intrasight 5y ago
Neat. How would this be used in edge infrastructure? And more broadly, what exactly is "edge infrastructure"?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Cynically "edge" is the way to say "not everything actually makes sense to run in the cloud but we can't go back on the marketing push that on prem infrastructure is a fossil so we'll call it edge". Or at least that's what it's meant at the last couple of companies I've worked for/with that were convinced they were going to "move everything to the cloud" despite the cries that the goal should be "move most things to the cloud" at the start. The marketing headline that tends to go with it is "edge is where the users are" but really it's come to mean any place you have non cloud infrastructure closer to the user than the internet (i.e. likely every place you have non cloud infrastructure). Less cynically some try to use it as a differentiator for running cloud services dispersed as close to users as possible for performance reasons vs running cloud services in centralized locations to reap the benefits of hyper scaling. Leaving "on premise infrastructure" to mean "legacy infrastructure" instead of allowing the term to follow any changes in the way that on premise infrastructure is run over time.
  - intrasight 5y ago
    I'd never considered "on premise" to be a type of "edge infrastructure" before, but technically I guess it is. But I'll stick to calling it "on premise" - because it's not "on premise" in order to have cloud services close to the user. It just hasn't yet migrated to the cloud. So keeping with the "cloud but close to user", where would this or any similar device play a role in edge infrastructure? Don't cloud/edge providers use the same hardware for both? Nobody is going to use this in production, and I don't see a role for testing either.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      It's a shitty choice for Edge device for sure but it's still an edge device. Just like it's a shitty Linux computer but still a computer. "Edge" is about where not what just like whether something is a "cloud" doesn't change based on if a Pi is used or not.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond what you'd expect. But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive. But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for fun, these things are awesome.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Pragmatic (as usual). ;-) I'm not so sure though that we're not seeing early forays into something that will in fact come down in cost, go up in efficiency.
- cpach 5y ago
  What are some good x86-64 alternatives to the Raspberry Pi? Asking since I’m quite out-of-date in my hardware knowledge. I guess what I want is low energy consumption, ~8 GB RAM (or more) and enough CPU to run a bunch of Docker containers. And a price tag that’s not higher than the Pi.
  - scottlamb 5y ago
    I don't think you're going to find anything as cheap as a single Pi, but you should be able to find something cheaper than the Turing Pi 2 ($200?), 4 of its CM4 adapters ($40 total), and 4 Raspberry Pi CM4s ($140 total): $380ish. One option is to buy a used Intel NUC on eBay. I bought one for $235 (with RAM, SSD, and case) a couple years ago that satisfies all that. I haven't looked into a lot of the other x86-64 SBCs. I really liked the ODROID-H2+ but it's discontinued due to supply chain problems. I'm hoping an ODROID-H3 or something will come out next year.
  - 5y ago
aejnsn 5y ago
Except the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules for this are now 4-5x their original price. I have a new Turing Pi in box that I refuse to drop $500 on the CM3 boards for. I’d rather just buy a surplus lot of desktop computers to build a toy cluster. I should probably just sell the Turing Pi. Useless, never even got to boot it. My Raspberry Pi 4 cluster works just fine though
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  The modules are the same price... just out of stock in perpetuity. A few months ago I'd find some here and there at Micro Center, but they've been out of stock for months. If you're patient you can get them at list price, though—I ordered the four 8GB Lite modules I used in the video over the past year, from two different suppliers.
- lbhdc 5y ago
  I have a turing pi v1 too, and havent been able to play with it because of this.
sussexby 5y ago
I have a similar-ish setup in the form of the ClusterHAT on a Pi 4 with 4x Pi Zero W connected to it. It gives me 4 individual Pi Zero machines (each with wireless) connected over the USB-Ethernet gadget interface to the Pi 4 which you can then bridge the interfaces as you need. My purpose was to have a SFF of individual wireless clients that I could control over SSH to do some network testing. Added benefit, the whole thing can be powered from a single PSU into the Pi 4.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I wonder if that will take the Zero 2W without excessive power drain.
walrus01 5y ago
unfortunately due to the way they're mounted, it won't fit in a 1U chassis...
rsync 5y ago
What is the metal mount used for the board in this picture: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/turing-pi-blinkenlights.gif https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/turi...
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  That's a BC1 mini from Streacom.
- qayxc 5y ago
  BC1 mini ITX build platform: https://amzn.to/3xHoHXt https://amzn.to/3xHoHXt
busymom0 5y ago
Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower powered board which can run a very simply web server (only needs to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun hobby project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio) to the board which charges it everyday and returns an html with how much I charged it and daily cardio stats. Basically, if I don’t do cardio, then the board won’t be charged enough to keep the site up, so that gives me incentive to do it regularly.
- ubergesundheit 5y ago
  This can be achieved with the original ESP 8266
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    Bad thing is that with a sufficiently large battery, he can probably skip a lot of days. They don't take much power. Its the right choice, though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ianai 5y ago
Jeff thank you so much for your continued work with the Pi!! I’ve learned so much from your book and YouTube content.

206 points by geerlingguy 5y ago

prettyStandard 5y ago

Why do I enjoy these raspberry pi articles so much?

intrasight 5y ago
For me it's because of the very idea of a $35 computer that's as powerful as a million dollar computer was when I was at university.
- daemin 5y ago
  Each one of these Raspberry Pi's is more powerful than the first few computers that I've used and owned. So to have a cluster of them feels like 1990's ultimate power!

Uehreka 5y ago

Every time something like this gets posted on HN, my brain does the same thing: “Neat! I wonder what Jeff Geerling will think of—Oh! This _is_ him!” Keep up the good work, and looking forward to hearing about if you’re able to get those Coral AI TPUs working!

nsky-world 5y ago

We are waited for this for soooo loooong!!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

volfied 5y ago

I am hoping someone can educate me. I do enjoy Jeff's articles and videos, but I fail to see what these could be used for. I concede that this is entirely due to my ignorance.

somethoughts 5y ago
I think one thing that would be interesting would be a fully native build environment and full native development tools for the Raspberry Pi. Building Ubuntu OS images from scratch on a Raspberry Pi server equivalent machine would be very interesting. For the non-embedded firmware engineer it is a-trivial to wrap your head around initially w.r.t. cross compiling Linux distros using ARM compilers running on an x86 host.
mataug 5y ago
There are a lot of industrial and commercial applications. My interest though is in running a low power cluster at home for testing random applications that I build. For example I'm writing an app for hosting documentation for household items and integrating it with a label printer. It would be great if I could host this and many other applications locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing together a bunch of raspberry pis with a network switch, or hosting it on a cloud service
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > It would be great if I could host this and many other applications locally on a K8s cluster instead of stringing together a bunch of raspberry pis with a network switch, or hosting it on a cloud service. Pardon my ignorance, but why couldn't you run this on a NUC or a NAS? Do you need HA for testing random apps? Or is it just that this is more fun and a learning experience?
  - cameron_b 5y ago
    My interest in this space is in the opportunity to test assumptions when scaling wide. Those of us without University compute access or Cloud budgets ( like neighborhood STEM classes ) can plunk down for a desktop learning environment that can run k8s or slurm and you can learn / teach MPI programming patterns with hands-on, and minimal risk.
  - mataug 5y ago
    Yes a NUC or NAS could do the job as well, so my interest is more of a fun learning experience.

xanaxagoras 5y ago

Jeff Geerling is one of the best tech Youtube channels out there

lapetitejort 5y ago
Red Shirt Jeff Geerling though? Still one of the best, let's be real.

intrasight 5y ago

Neat. How would this be used in edge infrastructure? And more broadly, what exactly is "edge infrastructure"?

zamadatix 5y ago
Cynically "edge" is the way to say "not everything actually makes sense to run in the cloud but we can't go back on the marketing push that on prem infrastructure is a fossil so we'll call it edge". Or at least that's what it's meant at the last couple of companies I've worked for/with that were convinced they were going to "move everything to the cloud" despite the cries that the goal should be "move most things to the cloud" at the start. The marketing headline that tends to go with it is "edge is where the users are" but really it's come to mean any place you have non cloud infrastructure closer to the user than the internet (i.e. likely every place you have non cloud infrastructure). Less cynically some try to use it as a differentiator for running cloud services dispersed as close to users as possible for performance reasons vs running cloud services in centralized locations to reap the benefits of hyper scaling. Leaving "on premise infrastructure" to mean "legacy infrastructure" instead of allowing the term to follow any changes in the way that on premise infrastructure is run over time.
- intrasight 5y ago
  I'd never considered "on premise" to be a type of "edge infrastructure" before, but technically I guess it is. But I'll stick to calling it "on premise" - because it's not "on premise" in order to have cloud services close to the user. It just hasn't yet migrated to the cloud. So keeping with the "cloud but close to user", where would this or any similar device play a role in edge infrastructure? Don't cloud/edge providers use the same hardware for both? Nobody is going to use this in production, and I don't see a role for testing either.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    It's a shitty choice for Edge device for sure but it's still an edge device. Just like it's a shitty Linux computer but still a computer. "Edge" is about where not what just like whether something is a "cloud" doesn't change based on if a Pi is used or not.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I love reading about all of these exotic Raspberry Pi projects and people pushing the Raspberry Pi into applications far beyond what you'd expect. But at the same time, I always hope that people recognize that these things are really not great solutions in general. This contraption idles at 15W (per the article) and pulls 24W during a benchmark. Within that power envelope you can pick up a more powerful tiny x86 board that takes up less space, probably costs less overall, and performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers. The Pi is a lot of fun and the Raspberry Pi foundation has done an excellent job of bringing us powerful ARM processors at low price points, but the gap between Quad Cortex-A72 and even a cheap, low-power x86 board is still massive. But on the other hand if you're doing this for learning and for fun, these things are awesome.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Pragmatic (as usual). ;-) I'm not so sure though that we're not seeing early forays into something that will in fact come down in cost, go up in efficiency.
cpach 5y ago
What are some good x86-64 alternatives to the Raspberry Pi? Asking since I’m quite out-of-date in my hardware knowledge. I guess what I want is low energy consumption, ~8 GB RAM (or more) and enough CPU to run a bunch of Docker containers. And a price tag that’s not higher than the Pi.
- scottlamb 5y ago
  I don't think you're going to find anything as cheap as a single Pi, but you should be able to find something cheaper than the Turing Pi 2 ($200?), 4 of its CM4 adapters ($40 total), and 4 Raspberry Pi CM4s ($140 total): $380ish. One option is to buy a used Intel NUC on eBay. I bought one for $235 (with RAM, SSD, and case) a couple years ago that satisfies all that. I haven't looked into a lot of the other x86-64 SBCs. I really liked the ODROID-H2+ but it's discontinued due to supply chain problems. I'm hoping an ODROID-H3 or something will come out next year.
- 5y ago

aejnsn 5y ago

Except the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules for this are now 4-5x their original price. I have a new Turing Pi in box that I refuse to drop $500 on the CM3 boards for. I’d rather just buy a surplus lot of desktop computers to build a toy cluster. I should probably just sell the Turing Pi. Useless, never even got to boot it. My Raspberry Pi 4 cluster works just fine though

geerlingguy 5y ago
The modules are the same price... just out of stock in perpetuity. A few months ago I'd find some here and there at Micro Center, but they've been out of stock for months. If you're patient you can get them at list price, though—I ordered the four 8GB Lite modules I used in the video over the past year, from two different suppliers.
lbhdc 5y ago
I have a turing pi v1 too, and havent been able to play with it because of this.

sussexby 5y ago

I have a similar-ish setup in the form of the ClusterHAT on a Pi 4 with 4x Pi Zero W connected to it. It gives me 4 individual Pi Zero machines (each with wireless) connected over the USB-Ethernet gadget interface to the Pi 4 which you can then bridge the interfaces as you need. My purpose was to have a SFF of individual wireless clients that I could control over SSH to do some network testing. Added benefit, the whole thing can be powered from a single PSU into the Pi 4.

rcarmo 5y ago
I wonder if that will take the Zero 2W without excessive power drain.

walrus01 5y ago

unfortunately due to the way they're mounted, it won't fit in a 1U chassis...

rsync 5y ago

What is the metal mount used for the board in this picture: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/turing-pi-blinkenlights.gif https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/turi...

geerlingguy 5y ago
That's a BC1 mini from Streacom.
qayxc 5y ago
BC1 mini ITX build platform: https://amzn.to/3xHoHXt https://amzn.to/3xHoHXt

busymom0 5y ago

Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower powered board which can run a very simply web server (only needs to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun hobby project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio) to the board which charges it everyday and returns an html with how much I charged it and daily cardio stats. Basically, if I don’t do cardio, then the board won’t be charged enough to keep the site up, so that gives me incentive to do it regularly.

ubergesundheit 5y ago
This can be achieved with the original ESP 8266
- _ea1k 5y ago
  Bad thing is that with a sufficiently large battery, he can probably skip a lot of days. They don't take much power. Its the right choice, though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ianai 5y ago

Jeff thank you so much for your continued work with the Pi!! I’ve learned so much from your book and YouTube content.