8 ms·
The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it lon
by bunderbunder 1y ago
The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.
- aprdm 1y agoThat really depends on what you want to learn and how deep. If you're automating things before the hypervisor comes online or there's an OS running (e.g: working on datacenter automation, bare metal as a service) you will have many gaps
- leoc 1y agoIf you want to run something like GNS3 network simulation on a hosting service's hardware you'll either have to deal with hiring a bare-metal server or deal with nested virtualisation on other people's VM setups. Network simulation absolutely drinks RAM, too, so just filling an old Xeon with RAM starts to look very attractive in comparison to cloud providers who treat it an expensive upsell.
- Almondsetat 1y agoI can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150. If you need cores and memory to make a lot of VMs you can do it extremely cheaply
- nine_k 1y agoIt will probably consume $150 worth of electricity in less than a month, even sitting idle :-\
- blobbers 1y agoThe internet says 100W idle, so maybe more like $40-50 electricity, depending on where you live could be cheaper could be more expensive. Makes me wonder if I should unplug more stuff when on vacation.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago> Makes me wonder if I should unplug more stuff when on vacation. What's the margin on unplugging vs just powering off?
- dijit 1y agoBy "off" you mean, functionally disabled but with whatever auto-update system in the background with all the radios on for "smart home" reasons - or, "off"?
- Symbiote 1y agoThat also depends on the country you live. The EU (and maybe China?) have been regulating standby power consumption, so most of my appliances either have a physical off switch (usually as the only switch) or should have very low standby power draw. I don't have the equipment to measure this myself.
- nine_k 1y agoI was surprised to find out that my apartment pulls 80-100W when everything is seemingly down during the night. A tiny light here and there, several displays in sleep mode, a desktop idling (mere 15W, but), a laptop charging, several phones charging, etc, the fridge switches on for a short moment. The many small amounts add up to something considerable.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoI got out of the homelab game as I finished my transition from DevOps to Engineering Lead, and it was simply massively overbuilt for what I actually needed. I replaced an ancient Dell R700 series, R500 series, and a couple supermicros with 3 old desktop PCs in rack enclosures and cut my electric bill nearly $90/month. Fuckin nutty how much juice those things tear through.
- amatecha 1y agoYeah it kinda puts it all into perspective when you think of how every home used to use 60-watt light bulbs all throughout. Most people just leave lights on all over their home all day, probably using hundreds of watts of electricity. Makes me realize my 35-65w laptop is pretty damn efficient haha
- kjkjadksj 1y agoSo shut it off when you don’t need it.
- Almondsetat 1y agoIsn't your home lab supposed to make you learn stuff? Why would you leave it idle?
- cjbgkagh 1y agoYou wouldn’t, it’s given as a lower bound, it costs more than that when not idling
- dijit 1y agobut then you’d turn it off, if you don’t then cloud is much more expensive too. Also $150 for 100w is crazy, thats like $1.70 per kWh; it would cost about $150 a year at the (high) rates of southern Sweden.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoIm not the OP, don’t know how they arrived at that cost. Personally it’s cheaper to buy the hardware that does spend most of its time idling. Fast turnaround on very large private datasets being key.
- swiftcoder 1y agoObviously the solution is to pickup another hobby, and enter the DIY solar game at the same time as your home lab obsession :D
- bokohut 1y agoInterestingly enough it is often times a foundational change in one's 'normal' that inspires something 'new'. In this case that 'new' is energy efficient software down to the individual lines of code and what their energy cost is on certain hardware. Academics are publishing about it in niche corners of the web and some entrepreneurs are doing it but of course none of this is cool now so we remain a mockery for our objectives. In time this too will become a real thing as many now are just beginning to feel the ever rising costs of energy which is only just starting to increase from decisions made years ago. The worst is yet to come as seen and heard directly from every single expert that has testified in the last years before the Energy and Commerce committee however only the outside-the-boxers among us watch such educational content to better prepare for tomorrow. Electricity powers our world and nearly all take it for granted, time too will change this thinking. :D
- sebastiansm 1y agoOn Aliexpress those Xeon+mobo+ram kits are really cheap.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago1. Not in the US with tariffs now. 2. I would not trust complicated electronics from Aliexpress from a safety and security perspective.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 1y agoSource? That seems like something I would want to take advantage if at the moment...
- kllrnohj 1y agoNote the E5-2690V4 is a 10 year old CPU, they are talking about used servers. You can find those on ebay or whatever as well as stores specializing in that. Depending on where you live, you might even find them free as they are often considered literal ewaste by the companies decommissioning them. It also means it performs like a 10 year old server CPU, so those 28 threads are not exactly worth a lot. The geekbench results, for whatever value those are worth, are very mediocre in the context of anything remotely modern: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-xeon-e5-2690-v4 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-xeon-e5-2690-... Like a modern 12-thread 9600x runs absolute circles around it https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-5-9600x https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-5-9600x
- mattbillenstein 1y agoThis is the correct analysis - there's a reason you see this stuff cheap or free. The homelab group on Reddit is full of people who don't understand any of this - they have full racks in their house that could be replaced with one high-end desktop.
- kllrnohj 1y ago> The homelab group on Reddit is full of people who don't understand any of this - they have full racks in their house that could be replaced with one high-end desktop. A lot of that group is making use of the IO capabilities of these systems to run lots of PCI-E devices & hard drives. There's not exactly a cost-effective modern equivalent for that. If there were cost-effective ways to do something like take a PCI-E 5.0 x2 and turn it into a PCI-E 3.0 x8 that'd be incredible, but there isn't really. So raw PCI-E lane count is significant if you want cheap networking gear or HBAs or whatever, and raw PCI-E lane count is $$$$ if you're buying new. Also these old systems mean cheap RAM in large, large capacities. Like 128GB RAM to make ZFS or VMs purr is much cheaper to do on these used systems than anything modern.
- mattbillenstein 1y agoPower and noise - old server hardware is not something you want in your home. Commodity desktop cpus with 32 or 64GB RAM can do all of this in a low-power and quiet way without a lot more expense.
- p12tic 1y agoThe problem is with the form factor, not the server hardware per-se. If one buys regular ATX motherboard that accepts server CPUs and fits it in regular ATX case, then there's lots of space for a relatively silent CPU air cooler. 2690 v4 idles at less than 40W which is not much more than a regular gaming desktop with a powerful GPU. The only problem in practice is that server CPUs don't support S3 suspend, so putting whole thing to sleep after finishing with it doesn't work.
- semi-extrinsic 1y agoFor $3000 you can get 3x used Epyc servers with a total of 144 cores and 384 GB memory, with dual-port 25Gbe networking so you can run them in a fully connected cluster without a switch. It will have >20x better perf/$ and ~3x better perf/W. That combo gives you the better part of a gigabyte of L3 cache and an aggregate memory bandwidth of 600 GB/s, while still below 1000W total running at full speed. Plus your NICs are the fancy kind that let you play around with RoCEv2 and such nifty stuff. It would also be relevant to then also learn how to do stuff properly with SLURM and Warewulf etc. instead of a poor mans solution with Ansible playbooks like in these blog posts.
- Almondsetat 1y agoYou are taking my reply completely out of context. If you want to learn clustering, you need a lot of cores and ram to run many VMs. You don't need them to be individually very powerful.
- p12tic 1y agoBetter build a single workstation - less noise, less power usage and the form factor is way more convenient. A budget of $3000 can buy 128 cores with 512GB of RAM on a single regular EATX motherboard, a case, a power supply and other accessories. Power usage is ~550W at maximum utilization which not much more than a gaming rig with a powerful GPU.
- Aurornis 1y ago> I can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150. If the goal is a lot of RAM and you don’t care about noise, power, or heat then these can be an okay deal. Don’t underestimate how far CPUs have come, though. That machine will be slower than AMD’s slowest entry-level CPU. Even an AMD 5800X will double its single core performance and even walk away from it on multithreaded tasks despite only having 8 cores. It will use less electricity and be quiet, too. More expensive, but if this is something you plan to leave running 24/7 the electricity costs over a few years might make the power hungry server more expensive over time.
- montebicyclelo 1y agoYeah... Looks like can get about $1/hr for 10 small VMs, ($0.10 per VM). So for $3000, that's 3000 hours, or 125 days, (if just wastefully leave them on all the time, instead of turning them on when needed). Say you wanted to play around for a couple of hours, that's like.. $3. (That's assuming there's no bonus for joining / free tier, too.)
- verdverm 1y agoYou can rent a beefy vm with an H100 for $1.50 / hr I regularly rent this for a few hours at a time for learning and prototyping
- wongarsu 1y agoThe VMs quickly get expensive if you leave them running though. The desktop equivalent of your 10 T3 Micro instances is about $600 if you buy new. For example a Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 2 Tiny 11JN009QGE has 8x3.2GHz processor with hyperthreading. That's 16 virtual cores compared to the 20 vcpus of the T3 instances, but with much faster cores. And 16GB RAM allows you to match the 1GB per instance. If you don't have anything and feel generous throw in another $200 for a good monitor and keyboard plus mouse. But you can get a used crap monitor for $20. I'd give you one for free just to be rid of it. That's a total of $800, or 33 days of forgetting to shut down the 10 VMs. Maybe half that if you buy used. Granted not everyone has $800 or even $400 to drop on hobby projects, renting VMs often does make sense
- pinkgolem 1y agoAre you comparing 10 VM with 1 shared core with a 144 core solution?
- nsxwolf 1y agoThat isn’t fun. I have a TI-99/4A in my office hooked up to a raspberry pi so it can use the internet. Why? Because it’s fun. I like to touch and see the things even though it’s all so silly.
- bakugo 1y agoIt heavily depends on the use case. For these AI setups, you're completely correct, because the people who talk about how amazing it is to run a <100B model at home almost never actually end up using it for anything real (mostly because these small models aren't actually very good) and are doing it purely for the novelty. But if you're someone like me who intends to actively use the hardware for real-world purposes, the cloud often simply can't compete on price. At home, I have a mini PC with a 5600G, 32GB of RAM, and a few TBs of NVME storage. The entire thing cost less than $600 a few years ago, and consumes around 20W of power on average. Even on the cheapest cloud providers available, an equivalent setup would exceed that price in less than half a year. SSD storage in particular is disproportionately expensive on the cloud. For small VMs that don't need much storage, it does make sense, but as soon as you scale up, cloud prices quickly start ballooning.
- swiftcoder 1y agoPlus you still have access to the whole lot when your ISP goes down (maybe less of a problem than it used to be, but not unheard of)
- newsclues 1y agoText and reference books are free at the library. You don’t need hardware to learn. Sure it helps but you can learn from a book and pen and paper exercises.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoI disagree. Most of what I've learned about systems comes from debugging the weird issues that only happen on real systems, especially real hardware. The book knowledge is like, 20-30% of it.
- titanomachy 1y agoAgreed, I don't think I'd hire a datacenter engineer whose experience consisted of reading books and doing "pen and paper exercises".
- mattbillenstein 1y agoLOL, no
- dukeyukey 1y agoIt's good for the soul to have your cluster running in your home somewhere.
- ofrzeta 1y agoMaybe so, but even then a second-hand blade server is more cost-effective than a Raspi Cluster.
- geerlingguy 1y agoNot if you run it idle a lot; most commercial blade servers suck down a lot of power. I think a niche where Pi blades can work is for a learning cluster, like in schools for HPC learning, network automation, etc. It's definitely not suited for production, but there, you won't find old blade servers either (for the power to performance issue).
- NordSteve 1y agoBad for your power bill though.
- platybubsy 1y agoI'm sure 5 rpis will devastate the power grid
- Damogran6 1y agoI got past that back when I was paying for ISDN and had 5 Surplus Desktop PCs...write it off as 'Professional development'
- throwaway894345 1y agoWhat does a few rpis cost on a monthly basis?
- theodric 1y agoDepends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo. Handy: https://700c.dk/?powercalc https://700c.dk/?powercalc My Pi CM4 NAS with a PCIe switch, SATA and USB3 controllers, 6 SATA SSDs, 2 VMs, 2 LXC containers, and a Nextcloud snap pretty much sits at 17 watts most of the time, hitting 20 when a lot is being asked of it, and 26-27W at absolute max with all I/O and CPU cores pegged. €3.85/mo if I pay ESB, but I like to think that it runs fully off the solar and batteries :)
- pinkgolem 1y agoFor learning I feel much safer setting everything up locally, worst case I have to reinstall my system. In the cloud, worst case I have a bill over 5-6 digits. And I know my ADD, 2 is not super unlikely.
- sam1r 1y agoA great way to do this is… is with a brand new Aws account, which will give you 1 year free across all services with reasonable limits.
- jahsome 1y agoOracle's free tier is pretty generous too.
- cramcgrab 1y agoI don’t know, i keyed this into google Gemini and got pretty far: “ Simulate an AWS AI cluster, command line interface. For each command supply the appropriate AWS AI cluster response”
- motorest 1y ago> The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. This. Some cloud providers offer VMs with 4GB RAM and 2 virtual cores for less than $4/month. If your goal is to learn how to work with clusters, nothing beats firing up a dozen VMs when it suits your fancy, and shut them down when playtime is over. This is something you can pull off in a couple of minutes with something like an Ansible script.