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I've been meaning to build something like this for a while now, and "performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tin

by pdpi 5y ago

I've been meaning to build something like this for a while now, and "performs much better without requiring you to coordinate your project across 4 separate tiny computers." is pretty much my motivation to do it — I want a sufficiently limited setup where I'll hit bottlenecks with relatively small workloads, because the whole point is playing with evading those bottlenecks.

bee_rider 5y ago
I'm almost wondering if this might be useful for a research lab, to prototype HPC algorithms. Like, I don't really want to run stuff on a big cluster or supercomputer while running my code. And it would be nice to have a tiny little cluster that hits bottlenecks while solving matrices that I can easily run on my desktop.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  The problem here is that the fidelity of a test run on a raspberry pi cluster, as compared to one run on the actual target hardware, is about the same as running the test on a cheaper and easier simulator environment of VMs.
  - accountofme 5y ago
    From what I have heard, Pi's are used by supercomputer clusters to solve the problem of testing code at scale (hundreds of nodes) but not on the expensive hardware.
- toast0 5y ago
  Probably not a research lab, but maybe an educational lab. Experience problems with multi-node systems and learn to work around them, but expect real application problems to be different.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I totally understand. This is a fun way to do it. A cheaper option would also be to run a lot of virtual machines on a single device and only assign them limited CPU and RAM budgets. You can actually do this all within a single Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with ESXi: https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esxi-on-arm-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esx... Not going to lie: I'd still enjoy having one of these Quad-Pi boards to play with, though.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Doing it with physical machine ls gives the real understsnding and ferls that you just dont get from the VM stuff

by pdpi 5y ago

bee_rider 5y ago

I'm almost wondering if this might be useful for a research lab, to prototype HPC algorithms. Like, I don't really want to run stuff on a big cluster or supercomputer while running my code. And it would be nice to have a tiny little cluster that hits bottlenecks while solving matrices that I can easily run on my desktop.

jcrawfordor 5y ago
The problem here is that the fidelity of a test run on a raspberry pi cluster, as compared to one run on the actual target hardware, is about the same as running the test on a cheaper and easier simulator environment of VMs.
- accountofme 5y ago
  From what I have heard, Pi's are used by supercomputer clusters to solve the problem of testing code at scale (hundreds of nodes) but not on the expensive hardware.
toast0 5y ago
Probably not a research lab, but maybe an educational lab. Experience problems with multi-node systems and learn to work around them, but expect real application problems to be different.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I totally understand. This is a fun way to do it. A cheaper option would also be to run a lot of virtual machines on a single device and only assign them limited CPU and RAM budgets. You can actually do this all within a single Raspberry Pi 4 8GB with ESXi: https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esxi-on-arm-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://www.servethehome.com/getting-started-with-vmware-esx... Not going to lie: I'd still enjoy having one of these Quad-Pi boards to play with, though.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Doing it with physical machine ls gives the real understsnding and ferls that you just dont get from the VM stuff