3 ms·

You can get intel NUCs way cheaper if you look around, or the Lenovo mini PCs. Small clusters will never beat a decent CPU but you can probably make a cluster o

by drum55 9mo ago

You can get intel NUCs way cheaper if you look around, or the Lenovo mini PCs. Small clusters will never beat a decent CPU but you can probably make a cluster of old mini PCs for less than the price of one.

yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
So obviously it depends on goals; I absolutely agree that up to a surprisingly high point, the best way to actually get the most compute is to go buy the most powerful single machine that will do what you want off eBay or whatever. My goal is the opposite; I want to specifically get my hands dirty figuring out how to actually provision and manage and operate a large number of hosts, even if they're so low resource as to be effectively worthless individually and are still weak clustered. To that end specifically, digikey claims to be willing to sell me a rather large number of pi zero 2w at $15/each - https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC1176/15298147?src=raspberrypi https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC11... - and even cheap used boxes on eBay seem to start at double that. Obviously you need a little bit more to actually run them, but I believe the only thing you actually need is a USB cable and then a single host computer can provide power and boot them over usb.
- drum55 9mo ago
  Just be aware that you’ll be stuck with wifi, or spending far more on ethernet adapters for them. If you want cheap with ethernet there’s other devices supported by Arabian in the same price range which have ethernet. It’s fun for sure to have a huge number of very cheap machines, I have an old arm cluster made of Odroid boards for that purpose.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
    I actually think I can run network over the USB connections to the head node anyways, though WiFi is also fine. Actually, you raise a good point: I should spend some time browsing the Armbian supported hardware list...
    - reerdna 9mo ago
      Wanted to reply to you directly also to increase the chance you see this because I think I had exactly the same intrusive thought as you, and actually built such a cluster recently. Would love to hear what you think: https://x.com/andreer/status/2007509694374691230/photo/1 https://x.com/andreer/status/2007509694374691230/photo/1
      - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
        I think that's amazing, surprisingly physically nice looking, and now you've gone and reminded me that Plan 9 is an option, which is kinda another tangent I didn't need:), but IIRC Plan 9 is really low resource so it might be a good fit (aside it lending itself to distributed computing). Have you written up the build anywhere?
        reerdna 9mo ago
        No, not beyond what I already put in the twitter thread. I wanted to wait until I had some cool distributed software running on it too, but then I ran into trouble with the plan 9 wifi drivers for the rpi being unstable and so I'm still working on fixing that. It does serve as a great test bed for that purpose too, as with 8 nodes I can get much more reliable data about how often the driver gets stuck
- adiabatichottub 9mo ago
  I feel you, but something like an R730 or 7810 with a pair of E5-2690 v4 and 128GB RAM can be had for under $400. Not the most power efficient, but you'd have to run it quite a while to make up the difference in energy cost. Plus there's way less work in getting it all set up.

by drum55 9mo ago

yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago

So obviously it depends on goals; I absolutely agree that up to a surprisingly high point, the best way to actually get the most compute is to go buy the most powerful single machine that will do what you want off eBay or whatever. My goal is the opposite; I want to specifically get my hands dirty figuring out how to actually provision and manage and operate a large number of hosts, even if they're so low resource as to be effectively worthless individually and are still weak clustered. To that end specifically, digikey claims to be willing to sell me a rather large number of pi zero 2w at $15/each - https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC1176/15298147?src=raspberrypi https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC11... - and even cheap used boxes on eBay seem to start at double that. Obviously you need a little bit more to actually run them, but I believe the only thing you actually need is a USB cable and then a single host computer can provide power and boot them over usb.

drum55 9mo ago
Just be aware that you’ll be stuck with wifi, or spending far more on ethernet adapters for them. If you want cheap with ethernet there’s other devices supported by Arabian in the same price range which have ethernet. It’s fun for sure to have a huge number of very cheap machines, I have an old arm cluster made of Odroid boards for that purpose.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
  I actually think I can run network over the USB connections to the head node anyways, though WiFi is also fine. Actually, you raise a good point: I should spend some time browsing the Armbian supported hardware list...
  - reerdna 9mo ago
    Wanted to reply to you directly also to increase the chance you see this because I think I had exactly the same intrusive thought as you, and actually built such a cluster recently. Would love to hear what you think: https://x.com/andreer/status/2007509694374691230/photo/1 https://x.com/andreer/status/2007509694374691230/photo/1
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
      I think that's amazing, surprisingly physically nice looking, and now you've gone and reminded me that Plan 9 is an option, which is kinda another tangent I didn't need:), but IIRC Plan 9 is really low resource so it might be a good fit (aside it lending itself to distributed computing). Have you written up the build anywhere?
      - reerdna 9mo ago
        No, not beyond what I already put in the twitter thread. I wanted to wait until I had some cool distributed software running on it too, but then I ran into trouble with the plan 9 wifi drivers for the rpi being unstable and so I'm still working on fixing that. It does serve as a great test bed for that purpose too, as with 8 nodes I can get much more reliable data about how often the driver gets stuck
adiabatichottub 9mo ago
I feel you, but something like an R730 or 7810 with a pair of E5-2690 v4 and 128GB RAM can be had for under $400. Not the most power efficient, but you'd have to run it quite a while to make up the difference in energy cost. Plus there's way less work in getting it all set up.