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My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to.
by chrissnell 4mo ago
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to.
I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.
I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
- xnyan 4mo ago> less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together. Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB. Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.
- teh_klev 4mo ago> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.
- serf 4mo agoit's not unmanageable to do if you have plentiful and cheap access to area that can see the sun. My 'vintage' computing collection got a lot bigger when I switched to solar. a big ask in most of the UK, though.
- bityard 4mo agoHow much power does that cluster consume?
- esskay 4mo agoSimilar here. I lucked out, a charity in the UK (Bernados) has an ebay account and they had a huge joblot of about 200 brand new DELL Optiplex 3050 Micros (i7 6700T, 16GB DDR4, 1tb SSDs). I picked up 4, at £50 each, and when they arrived they were still sealed, and included a power supply, keyboard, mouse and windows 11 license (which never got used). Makes the pi look like a terrible deal given you've also gotta buy power supply, a hdmi adapter for their moronic decision to use mini hdmi, etc