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For the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi, you can rent a considerably more powerful "small" EC2 spot instance for 7 months, or a more comparable "micro" for 16 months
by teraflop 14y ago
For the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi, you can rent a considerably more powerful "small" EC2 spot instance for 7 months, or a more comparable "micro" for 16 months. Much longer if you don't need it running 24/7, of course.
Granted, that's no substitute if you need something with physical I/O ports, but if you want to learn how to set up a real compute cluster, EC2 is a more realistic environment.
- jlgreco 14y agoThe value of students being able to see and touch what they are working with in the back of their classroom should really not be underestimated I think. Furthermore, a raspberry pi cluster allows the students the opportunity to work with pretty much every aspect of supercomputing. Those two aspects combined more than make up for the really trivial cost Pi's may cost over micro EC2 instances unless you are really interested in pinching pennies above other considerations.
- amvp 14y agoI didn't realize spot instances were so much cheaper than on-demand. A small on-demand instance is ~47$/month
- Joeboy 14y ago> For the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi Model A should be out in the next few weeks, which will make that $25.
- archangel_one 14y agoNot having an Ethernet port would be a bit of a handicap for this kind of work.