Meet the new SBC Linux Cluster King!
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
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Turing Pi's shaking things up with their new RK1. It's 5x faster than the Pi CM4.
But is it worth the price? Dive into my test results, then we'll rack up two SBC clusters: 6 Pi CM4s on the DeskPi Super6c cluster board, and 4 Turing Pi RK1s in the Turing Pi 2.
Some things I mentioned in the video (some links are affiliate links):
- My Pi Cluster open source project: github.com/geerlingguy/pi-clu...
- Turing Pi 2: turingpi.com/product/turing-p...
- Turing RK1: turingpi.com/product/turing-r...
- DeskPi Super6C: amzn.to/3UuBLMW
- Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4: www.raspberrypi.com/products/...
- DeskPi RackMate T1 (US): amzn.to/44dfYww
- DeskPi RackMate T1 (UK): www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CS6MHCY8
- Deskpi RackMate T1 (DE/EU): www.amazon.de/dp/B0CS6MHCY8
- MyElectronics dual ITX rackmount enclosure: amzn.to/3UxidYa
- My 2021 video on Turing Pi 2: • 4 Pis on a mini ITX bo...
- My 2022 video on deploying the TP2 on a farm: • Taking my Raspberry Pi...
- COOLM 12v 8A power supply: amzn.to/3UyBbOn
Support me on Patreon: / geerlingguy
Sponsor me on GitHub: github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy
Merch: redshirtjeff.com
2nd Channel: / geerlingengineering
Contents:
00:00 - The new king
00:57 - CM4 vs RK1
02:11 - A crippling feature
04:22 - RK1's RK3588 performance
05:57 - Mini 10" Rackmount
07:11 - Rackmount build
15:24 - Mini Rack build
19:32 - First boot in the rack
20:49 - Configuring networking with Ansible
24:00 - Kubernetes install
26:34 - Kubernetes overview and debugging
28:26 - It works!
29:31 - And it's faster!
30:02 - Working on a new site - Věda a technologie
![tattoo printer tutorial[제품단순선물]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/g40_GwEJak0/mqdefault.jpg)
"All's well that ends in "Not A Fire"" - a motto to live by.
This is my new favorite quote
Jeff, Thank you for your honesty in who sent you what and how things were paid for. That’s very refreshing in this space and shows you value your audience
It's not even legal to _not_ disclose things. Sadly, many creators aren't up-front about where they get things. Honesty's the best policy... and the best way to ensure the FTC doesn't have to get involved haha.
“I don’t need a cluster”
“What would I use it for”
“It’s just gonna be running some bullshit”
I so really want one
This is the way.
@@JeffGeerling Why not walk both ways?
First, I completely agree with you. I think this is amazing, just to learn how to build an HPC System, and to see how it works.
I'm in that boat! I have quite a few Libre Computers and Pis, but also small PCs sitting around waiting for projects, while also having a large NAS which sits on top of a Dell Poweredge... The NAS gets use very very regularly, but not all the SBCs or the Dell.
But it will run.... whatever.
As in, nothing you want to do.
I'll stick to my 7950x.
I would be more interested in a lower powered NAS board with just the 4 nvme drives on it or better, loaded with SATA ports.
My wallet wishes I had never discovered your channel ... keep up the great coverage of your SBC adventures, you play in the same space I'm interested in.
Yo, Only Fans reveal at 11:12!
That would be one scary channel ;-)
I always snicker when I see the "Only Fans" container.
When my son was in cub scouts, he sold popcorn like all the scouts did. We borrowed a wagon to put the popcorn in, and found a cardboard box that fit perfectly! As I was walking behind him I realized that we'd have to ditch the cardboard box. It was one that we got at the local library book sale (They were selling unpopular books to make room for more books.) Written across the back of the box someone wrote "ADULT BOOKS" in large letters. That phrase has a completely different meaning outside of libraries. Lol!
Man i really hope that Raspberry Pi prices comes down to a reasonable level, so that us enthusiast can do stuff like these
It won't. But I do recommend considering getting it either used or older gen like Raspberry Pi 3 for example which is lot cheaper than Pi 4 or 5, especially if you don't need the performance of those.
Pi 3 or Pi 4 (or even Zero 2W) are probably the sweet spot for value in the Pi lineup right now.
If they release a 2GB Pi 5 for $40, that would be a great value.
appears to be heading in the right direction. :)
@@JeffGeerling That's be like putting a v4 in an old muscle car. We all know that we don't build these things because we need them. We build them because we NEED them
> corpo enshitification enters the chat
this stuff does not make sense when for this price you can buy 3-5 mini pc with 8 core ryzen cpus. you don't have to deal with arm specific software and the performance are 10 times faster.
Rule of cool means this is better
Break out the soldering iron and swap the direction those power leads exit the PSU board. No more fan-blade jeopardy, no more stressing of the board connector.
True. May do that before I move the mini rack into its final location.
That rockship kicks butt, I can tell, I have a NanoPC-T6 powered by that baby, it ROCKS!
Thank you for showing the debugging steps with the cluster, including how to see which pod had stalled and finding error logs using "describe". You can watch 100 happy path tutorials without ever seeing these things.
The RK1 boards are crazy fast! I have two of these TuringPi 2 boards, running 2 RK1s and 2 CM4s each. A sort of P-module, E-module configuration. 92GB of RAM and 82 GHz of CPU. I use Hashicorp Nomad to orchestrate tasks using a combination of the Docker and Exec drivers. Ceph to manage the persistent volumes. Soon I'll be able to retire my power-hungry my Dell R710s in favor of a system that draws < 200W. Couldn't be happier with the results!
As soon as you said pod was pending and you were using nfs I said to my self "nfs-common". Great video!
Haha if you know, you know. Usually you go down every other avenue and then the 100th google search you get a path that leads to a solution.
I got lucky in this case and skipped the first 99 dead ends!
@@JeffGeerling I've integrated that into my playbooks because Longhorn Storage Class uses it. Took me a while to figure that one out!
Really love the screen time during installation and configuration so didactic!!
Excellent! Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the new base board with 10GbE.
Thanks for all your hard work, Jeff.
Really seems like the Turing Pi board could benefit from having a switch chip. Even if you still only had 1 Gb or 2.5 Gb connectivity to the external network, having a 40/80Gb switching fabric between nodes would make something like Ceph internal replication or any node to node comms in the cluster much better. Of course, having a 10 Gb SFP+ would also be ideal, since so much 10 Gb fiber gear is plummeting in price these days, and might obsolete the need for finding another big chip and traces on the board, so that might the smarter play.
I do hope they do a Turing Pi 3, where they maybe bump the price a little, but include some features that will let the board really go all-out on performance.
The problem is as the price of the board sneaks past $200, $300, or more, the audience gets even more limited :(
@@JeffGeerling I hear you, but I think this space could do with some better comms around what makes sense and what you _can_ do with these platforms. Like, a 4 node cluster on the Turing Pi 2 at $1500 does not make sense for most home lab operators and especially not the folks running single purpose GPIO heavy configs, but $1500-2000 for a 4 node Ceph backed lightweight k8s platform with a slough of groupware appliance containers is a stellar HA homelab / business server in a single box. For the load of businesses I know trying to de-SaaS their OpEx while still looking for a reliable solution, this is barking up the right tree for sure.
Thanks for the mini-rack link. I've been looking for something like this for a while, thinking I was just not looking in the right place. Great for a mini home lab.
I have one of these, and it is spectacular! I couldn't afford to get 4x of the 32gb nodes, but I have two of em. They are heckin nice.
It is nice to have x86-level performance in the same power footprint as a Pi!
The 32GB Turing is still less than the price to upgrade to 32GB Ram in a Mac.
Ouch.
So true it hurts!
Free tip: Don't shake and wave you hands when you are holding something we are trying to see. Very common on CZcams but you can beat it. I did for teaching.
Solid advice 👌
These cluster boards keep getting cooler and cooler. Not sure what i would do with one but it would be cool to play with.
Love these tiny videos. As someone who does Van Life traveling full time in my van, I’m always looking for ways to run NAS and cluster solutions in a compact “portable” way. Especially love it when you can run on 12v, 24v, or 48v DC.
This rack is a master piece of engineering for home datacenters. 🙂 A little UPS would be indeed amazing. Whoever creates it, shut up and take my money! 😀
I've been using the turingpi 2 with 3x RK1's for a few weeks, and really enjoying it.
Ive been managing it using the Ansible for DevOps and Ansible for Kubernetes books you put out, so many thanks for that!
So glad I could help! Reminds me I need to get around to updating those books again...
Letting red shirt Jeff in to the studio seems reckless.
Red shirt seems calm in this video.
I wonder when failsafe systems and ECC memory will be popular🤔
That Quad board look like such a nice cluster training tool!
I wonder how it compares to a Milkv pioneer, double the cores, same memory, not a cluster but a "desktop", it does have 10G eth (x2) and NVME.
It's less than double the price, for double the cores and the same amount of ram but probably faster as it is all in one place. No NPU on the pioneer, but it does have pci-express ports so you can add a large video card if the drivers support it, and if you upgrade the power supply.
I absolutely loved the 10 inch rack idea, this is new to me. I have a (official status pending) RISC-V lab in Costa Rica, with a bunch of licheepi4a, vision five I&II, beagleV, mangopi, etc, etc. I think the milkv pioneer is mini-itx, so it would be cool to fit in all of the lab in this rack. It's a bit pricey, but would look and function way nice than what I have right now.
The Rackmate T1 in this video is awesome!
I just like how it looks, a compact blinkenlights thingy. So cool.
Heh, I need to make a Mini ITX board with just tons of little LEDs around random circuits and chips, that blink in random patterns. The Blinkenlights ITX Board.
@@JeffGeerling Jeff, I'm not gonna lie, but I even bought the IKEA "OBEGRÄNSAD" just to have more blinkenlights in my room. I'm a huge fan of the Connection Machine's by Thinking Machines corporation; even went to NYC just to see the CM-5 at the MoMA. I love the thought process behind it; to give the machines a visual representation of the computation going on as if the black box is thoughtful. I have a few of books and saved YT videos about it too. There's some other pure blinkenlight projects but I couldn't afford them. But I've basically built my own homelab around maximizing the lighting. I was sad to even leave my X79 DDR3 era boards when I upgraded because Crucial's Ballistix Tracer DDR3 were the only RAM kits with true electrically driven LEDS instead of pure software. Made quite a show. Wish you could see my setup, lol.
That little mini rack thingy is rather neat. I wonder if one could make a small easy to move server with a rack for compute, a rack for storage, a switch, and if there is such thing, a UPS.
This thing is sooo cool. I stopped running a homelab or server for my house because of power consumption. This setup is making me rethink that. I could do crazy stuff with one of these boards.
Like what ?
Practically, you don't need an SBC cluster. Single CPU x86 machine will be faster, and more important, easier to support.
So performance comparison between different SBC cluster does not have a practical meaning.
But it is still fun!
I think you forgot that the main point of this was how power-efficient it was for the performance.
@@xanderplayz3446 Modern x86 will be more power efficient than a cluster of SBCs.
its good for 24/7 use at home without using much electricity. I too have x86 based ones and they break the bank. btw did you know the orange pi 5 rk3588 is so much cheaper than the best x86 SBC for the same performance? it matches the intel N200 CPU in performance, thats how fast the rk3588 is. It beats intel in some things but loses in anything avx.
@@Lincos321what would you use with x86 as a replacement ?
I don't have a use for a cluster system, but they're entertaining.
Make it work, do some brutal testing with it. Really brutal testing.
big QUESTION, how would a minecraft server perform on this?
The mini UPS sounds like a cool idea. I'm thinking, make it be a shared power supply as well, so integrate a switch mode power supply in there that keeps the batteries charged, and have a bunch of 12v outputs with individual reset-able fuses, plus maybe some 5v outputs. Include a micro-controller in it with some temperature and voltage sensors to keep the charge levels and temperature in check, with an output to a character LCD and a USB port for UPS management.
You read my mind when you talk about a UPS for a mini rack. That would be siiiick
APC's most popular models are like 7 years old and use lead-acid batteries. They don't seem to feel much competitive pressure.
14:00 you could even solder in the power leads on the other side of the pcb
I did not know about 10" rack systems. Very cool.
@JeffGeerling In reply to your comment on 17:46 about the availability of 10" racks in Europe: I got lucky getting a 30cm deep closed 12U rack from a now defunct Polish company (COVID stock/supply issues I guess) I only could get the MyElectronics 2U enclosure in there by putting in some custom spacers to get the ITX case closer to the glass front door. Otherwise the cables in the back would just not fit. Any deeper rack would not have fitted in my utility closet.
I once revved out the diesel my driving instructor used when I was still learning for my driverslicense, some 300 meters from where MyElectronics is currently based in Alkmaar. I now have one more reason to chuckle about that event, 'some' American guy made realise that they were based there.. :)
I ordered new Turing Pi 2.5 with those RK1s with 32GB RAM each. I can't wait! But yeah... elephant is big, and even dual 2,5G would be great. 1Gigs for this is too small bandwith and just because of that I was postponing my ordering since like a year... I finally decided that it might be ok, but I still wish it has faster network.
Brought to you by the Pi Cluster King!
I found with k8s that setting up calico or flannel (can’t remember which one) messed with mDNS on the cluster, it would change the source port of the response and avahi would drop it. It would add some iptable entries and would always put its own rules first even if you manually inserted your own rules before.
No idea if you use those in your script but noticed you’re using mDNS figured it was worth shouting about
Fever dreaming out loud for engagement: I want to stick one of these cluster boards in a 2x 3.5" bay NAS case for a 3 node apps cluster and the 1 node that has the sata slots being the bulk storage. Alternately, would love to see a laptop form factor that could take one of those RK1s (like the MNT reform, or similar).
MNT reform + RK1 would rock! It's a niche use case and a niche laptop, but if you're in that niche, the RK3588 would probably be the closest thing to a 'good' average x86 laptop experience in Arm-land right now.
PI's are getting insane dude! 😲
I saw a talk a few years ago at kubecon where the speaker was the guy who first named kubectl and he said it was "kube control". And that fits my narrative, so I'm sticking with it
So is Kube pronounced "Cube" or "Koob" or "Coob" or "CooBee" ?
Great question, "cube control" if I remember correctly... It was the "control" bit I was worried about
Simply AMAZING !!!
I’m always highly impressed when someone gets Drupal to do anything sensible at all, let alone a usable deployment of it.
18:30 well you can get some small form factor ups from eaton, well there are just desktop ones and i think you will have to make a bracket of some sort to fix them into place but it schould be doable (maybe they even include mounting kits for 10 inch, its some time since i installed one of them so i can´t remember 100% if it had that or note but from memory the size schould fit)
"Worst case, we'll just have a little smoke come out here." and then a little later "all's well that ends in not a fire". Sounds like a good day at the office.
Sick video, Jeff as always. Love to see some RGB on that rack. 😊
Thanks Jeff you're such a nice person someone I'd love to meet next time you're in England. David
Felt like I unlocked a core memory when Jeff slid that Pi Blade out. Forgot I'm still waiting on mine. Soon™
Jeff, have you seen the Mixtile Blade 3 with the cluster box. Looks like a nice clustering box
I am eagerly awaiting my Turing RK1 modules. My plan is to build an ARM based CI/CD cluster and I am curious to see if the gigabit connection ends up being a bottleneck.
Another question - do you think that the tower cabinet could handle two of the Mini-ITX cases?
[I have two Turing Pi 2 boards from the campaign, along with eight RK1s, ready to go... and have been instigating Mini-ITX cases for a while now...]
Awesome detailed look. The 1Gbps is definitely showing its age. The price is kinda crazy also. Hope they can increase production to make it cheaper
if you want the led activity indicators from your cluster board, I would try to make a passive light pipe solution with some pieces of clear petg filament, perhaps with a little bit of gaff tape or electrical tape or something to keep the light in the pipes seperate. diy fiber optic.
These RK3588 SoCs are quite amazing to behold anyway, it seems.
From a regular user's perspective, I'd still love to see an ITX board for desktop use but the board you used here is interesting to watch too.
Radxa Rock 5 ITX is perfect for desktop use case.
If you are going to standardize on 12 VDC devices, you could put a battery in the bottom of the rack. Then you can feed the rest of the rack from there. Could even get a DC power bank and use that to connect to the AC or DC source of your choice and keep the rack powered even in transport.
It's such a minor thing, but "sudo su" always bugs me. It feels like when the switch from using su to using sudo went mainstream people said "but how can I use su now?" and found a hacky way of doing it without looking at the documentation.
"sudo -i" gets you an interactive shell using the target user's default shell and runs the login files for that shell. "sudo -s" uses the invoking user's shell. Either feels cleaner imo.
There's many ways to cut a cake, and there's rarely a right and a wrong, but I wanted to put "sudo -i" out there in case others maybe think it sounds neater too.
True; for me I just have muscle memory from whenever ago to use 'sudo su' :D
@@JeffGeerlingI have the same issue: muscle memory! I know about the “proper” way, but “sudo su -“ is so embedded in my brain I can’t seem to switch completely, even though I do some times… 😅🫣
Well, I think "sudo su" is just easier to remember and more in line with all the other "sudo ".
Id rather do "sudo su" knowing that its well tested and works rather than using possibly untested parameters that maybe 100 people in the world knows about.
How about 'sudo sh'̈...
@@hubertnnnIt's well tested, so the limitations are well known. If you want to start an interactive root shell from sudo, it's just not the correct way.
with the mini UPS thing, could use some of those USB-PD triggerboards and a compatible battery bank. course might want to collab with one of the eletrical engineer youtubers to work out how to make it do passthrough+charge cause some batterybanks turn off when charged up
Great vid - the sound is very different, and it looks like you green screened your eclipse photo/workspace - is this in your new space ?
I got plenty 10" racks at work and we are using the TP-Link TL-SG1210MPE switch for it (: PoE, SFP, managed.... downside is the external power supply... fits perfectly in a 10" shelf
Not a bad option! I do wish it had all ports + lights on front though, instead of the desktop configuration with the ports on back. Though, depending on what kind of gear you have, it may be cleaner that way!
I have to say that the 10 Inch Rack just makes sense for small builds where space is very limited. hell I've debated about going that path for somethings after you've mentioned 'myelectronics' a couple of times on top of you deploying their cases for some of the builds
Thanks. Good info.
Have been working with the TuringPi2 and RK1 Boards for a few months and recently also received a few different mPCIe devices, unfortunately with very bad results. Only 1 in 5 boards would show up.
I do hope you look into testing mPCIe devices with the TuringPI2 similar to what you have done with the CM4 as it seems to be either a bit of a jungle compatibility wise or alternatively the faulty connection on the TuringPi2 side.
only board I got working was a IOCREST 4 Port SATA with a 88SE9215 chip, Tried a few realtek ethernet adapters and a different SATA adapter.
PCIe is a weird beast with the RK3588, not to mention through the Turing Pi 2 board. I have had weird issues as well, to the point I don't try many anymore.
i just suscribed, lets be real, your content is really interesting and i enjoy it :)
That's a cool computer mini rack 👍
I remember when data rates went from 110 baud to 300 baud. That speed increase was amazing for the time. And years later the first 14,400 baud modem came to market at $14,400 each. These young folks think 1Gbps is slow. They do not know what slow is. It did teach us patience.
BTW I literally saw the person who wrote kubectl at a talk in person and he said that it is pronounced "cube control".
So a bit less cuddly!
@@JeffGeerling to be fair, virtually everyone else seems to call it "cube cuddle" no matter what the creator says.
I wouldn't even want a real ups for it, but more just a batter bank to supply 12v to the itx picopsu and maybe a switch, though might need 52v for a poe switch
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the use case for such an esoteric machine; what can be accomplished on this that can't be done on a similarly priced SMP server?
I just received my rk3588 board today and it's been many years since I did anything with arm, so I'm really excited. It's amazing how fast those things have become. By the way, it does support usb otg 3.1 gen 1, so if you need more bandwidth, maybe that could be a way to do it?
Creative video, thank you :)
Server on the go? I think this would make an awesome little travel server. Your main mini itx pc, your cluster server, and a travel router would probably fit really well and it looks like it could fit in a little carrying case.
I, (like so many others) are going back to Mint! We've had it with Snap Packages and Ubumtu slowing down. So we'd like to see you using Debian more.
well, now I need that mini rack
does the ipmi/bmc do some kind of serial forwarding (SOL) as well or do you just address each board through the built-in switch? also can you bond the ports on the built-in ethernet switch or are they something more like 2 ports on a hub?
about 20 years ago the cluster system working on 1G bit ethernet was too slow, which we could get off, our HW teams had a 10G switch backplane and looking at 100G or maybe a 1T switching backplane (but we were working on an edge router for a city 500,000 users per cluster) full HA with fall over in less than 1mS.
but looking at the internet today we may have needed 10T bit
you can add 4pin fan header to v 2.4 boards but you have to solder a coonecot and a chip onto the board.
@JeffGeerling In reply to your comment on 17:46 about the availability of 10" racks in Europe: I got lucky getting a 30cm deep closed 12U rack from a now defunct Polish company (COVID stock/supply issues I guess) I only could get the MyElectronics 2U enclosure in there by putting in some custom spacers to get the ITX case closer to the glass front door. Otherwise the cables in the back would just not fit. Any deeper rack would not have fitted in my utility closet.
I once revved out the diesel my driving instructor used when I was still learning for my driverslicense, some 300 meters from where MyElectronics is currently based in Alkmaar. I now have one more reason to chuckle about that event, 'some' American guy made realise that they were based there.. :)
Ha! Yeah, they could even shave a little more depth from their designs but if you have a deep enough rack or open back, no problem at all.
Would it be possible to reverse the side those two power cables come into on the pico-psu? If they entered that mini board from the far side there'd be no chance of them hitting the fan.
Thanks Jeff, so x86 is still a cheaper and more practical option as of today? I can buy a stock G9 HPE server with the same number of Cores/Threads and RAM for about 500$.
Lovely labels on the fan box ;) How does this compare to the Ampere 64 core ASRock Rack? Withouth memory that is also $1500, so slightly more expensive.
It's a lot easier to build with the Ampere, it has a LOT more PCIe expansion available, and if you just want a high performance Arm setup, I'd go with the ASRock Rack setup.
I like the cluster so I can use it in my lab for little K3s/Kubernetes testing on real hardware, but it is still not a match for a single high performance workstation/CPU.
@@JeffGeerlingdoes one server motherboard will be faster than Turing pi with 4 boards ? I’d like to use kubernetes for my apps as well, is it worth it to set up a single node cluster on a board you mentioned?
I actually forgot to put in issue/pr over a year ago for the nfs-common issue as I used your playbook to deploy to Ubuntu arm systems previous, my bad!
Is there enough pci lanes for the npu,, pci slot usb as well as 10gig for each module? Not sure if they’re using pci switch chips
I have the TP 2.4 with 3 CM4's and an RK1, would be great to see a series based on using ansible and k3s to add services like plex, owncloud, etc. I have it up and running k3s and want to add mulitple server applications using symfony and maybe how to use argoCD etc.
That rack would be great for basic networking and a media pc.
Maybe a stupid question, but i thought the nvme slot is just a pci-ex port.. when you can write that fast into it, maybe use a M.2 to pcie adapter and a 10gb card ??
(Since it's not a slow wlan port)
Idea for a cluster: take Framework Laptop mainboards (the ones with USB 4 for PCIe tunneling and 10Gbps+ networking) and bolt them into these enclosures. I think you might even be able to fit a full 4 of them in there. the keystone slots at the back up top could be USB-C Keystones for power and for the big opening you could 3d print an IO shield so you could put in other keystones for IO. Fully x86, BLAZING fast IO for that small of a cluster, and possibly pretty energy efficient.
for deep stuff like the RK1 in that rack, it'd be nice if they included rear supports like what the shelf had.
That seems like an easy enough accessory to make-put a few bends in some metal.
@@JeffGeerling Perhaps someone (not suggesting you take this on) could design some brackets that could either be 3D printed, or sent to a service like SendCutSend or OshCut to be laser cut and bent as specified. Yes, additional ones available from them would be nice. They list additional rack shelves for sale, but don't seem to have considered additional support brackets as an item people might want.
4:55 - Yep. Just what I thought. That red linux shirt was a sign...
Whats going on with that CR2032 battery and the adapter board visable at 2:08 - Pretty swanky!
I've done a fair bit of cluster computing, on big clusters like Stampede at the University of Texas, so I'm familiar with the desire of cluster creators to have fast shared filespace and high speed interconnect fabrics etc - *but* - at least for all the real projects (as opposed to demos or benchmarks) that I've used clusters for in real life, I've always been able to structure my code so that high speed interconnects and fast shared filespace are just are not needed. Even for applications where there was big data rather than just a lot of CPU being used. My observation is that these extreme hardware facilities are mostly used by people who don't make the effort to optimise their application for parallelism and who try to shoehorn code that was really designed with uniprocessing in mind, into a multiprocessing environment without taking on the necessary restructuring. Now I'm retired, when I need to throw CPU at a problem I just farm it out to a few dozen regular Pi's and a couple of spare x86 portables I have around the house, running over Wifi, with one regular NFS mount to supply shared files across the lightweight cluster. In fact - although I do have proper cluster MPI software installed, I generally can get by with just kicking off tasks using "ssh". So I mention all this to suggest that perhaps the features you describe and the cost of the system you're using is perhaps a little overkill, that could be avoided by a little more coding effort. An interesting approach for a subsequent video might be in terms of computation done per dollar rather than just what is the fastest shinyest new hardware available?
Sadly when you talk to anyone about making code better versus beefing up the hardware, 99 times out of 100 you'll be told the hardware's easier :D
One of the reasons I love Pi clusters is I've changed my own site architecture many times to make it faster (avoiding disk IO where I can, caching in RAM on individual nodes, that sort of thing), and made big sites scale (think millions of dynamic page views per hour) on relatively modest AWS resources... all because I would run the same application on my Pi cluster that we were running on $20,000/month servers :D
But not every project allowed me the time to optimize. Sometimes the plan was to build up hardware for a month, then tear it all down, and they were happier doing that spending $100k+, than to spend an extra two weeks optimizing the site (for a lot less).
Read "In Search of Clusters", a fine book. Amdahls Law; show me where the data is and I'll show you where the computing has to take place. At some point all parallel computations reduce to a set of serial instructions. It's the law. Clusters live and die by the speed of their switching fabric, and that will always be the case.
That’s pretty cool - I want
For price comparison- there are plenty of used epyc cpu + mobo + ecc ram combos on offer for less money.. more grunt, more power bills
If power's cheap, then some used servers or mini PCs are definitely a better option, cost-wise. Power's luckily pretty cheap most places in the US!
@@JeffGeerling then again.. there is no substitute for having an arm cluster in your home lab, when production deployments are likely to be arm based in future as well.
Been using arm AWS instances a little lately, and they do hum along quite nicely
i understand about the LOW_PRO fan in the front but would it be wrong just to unsolder to 2 power and re-solder from the backside aslong as same orientation? @Jeff Geerling
for $1500, could easily get a 16 core 32 thread and with 128GB dd5 and a great motherboard, case and power for less than the cost of the max version.
18:48 cool idea - how about a few lipos with a pi doing power management..
I've seen a few people buidl their own Pi-based UPSes. It can be done! I'd love to see a more commercial product for it, or at least a kit you could buy and insert your own battery(ies).
Thanks 👍
20:46 Is that case lid a USB-A socket? lol flipping it three times to get it to fit? :P
Also, do you have a video already that goes over how you set up your infrastructure at home/office? Do you use monorepos for all your infrastructure? :)
The studio moving videos would answer the office part, but I dont know for the home part.
@@xanderplayz3446 I missed a word in my question actually. I meant to refine it to how he sets up his ANSIBLE infrastructure. :)
But yeah, I love that series. I don't think he's done an overview (or I haven't caught/found it) of how he organizes his complete infrastructure for ansible.