Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
blog.alexellis.io
Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
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Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#2Neat! I built something like this long ago (https://clustercompute.com/) to digitize a very large number of CDs for a Dutch broadcasting corporation. If I were to tackle that project today this is probably how I would do it.
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#3I was looking for something similar earlier this year and ended up with SOPINE's cluster board. It only supports 7 ARM modules at a time but you can always stack multiple boards. Its also inexpensive. The SOPINE board I have has worked very well and recommend it.
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#4This is going to be a stupid question...but what does clustering do? Does it increase the amount of "cores" in a system? What about the RAM? Or is the clustering software a task manager that allocates different boards as needed depending on the the task load?
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#5This is going to be a stupid question...but what does clustering do? Does it increase the amount of "cores" in a system? What about the RAM? Or is the clustering software a task manager that allocates different boards as needed depending on the the task load?
There are no stupid questions. Clustering allows you to do more jobs at once than you could do with a single machine of the same power. It allows for redundancy if you set things up in such a way that if one hardware components fails another takes over. It can allow for better isolation between processes for security reasons than what a process isolated from another process on the same machine can give you. And many other reasons besides, so clustering is a technique that can give you many different benefits.
But...
There is a price to pay. Clustering isn't easy, convenient or without overhead. As soon as you cross the boundaries of what a single machine can give everything suddenly has a price, either in terms of latency, throughput, complexity or loss of control. Clustering software tries to hide some of this but under the hood these will always be there.
Here are some good hints about what limitations you are operating under no matter how good your distributed environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#6Also check out Rancher. Lite weight K8 for distributed IoT. Scaling to 1000s of ARM nodes, clusters morph into incredibly smart supercomputing grids ;)
https://thenewstack.io/how-low-can-kubernetes-go-rancher-arm...
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#7Note that the Raspberry Pi can boot over PXE without an SD card these days, which should make for a much more reliable setup.
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#8Wasn't that a thing like 5 years ago, when Pi 1 came out?
Of course back then Docker didn't run on Pi, but other clustering software did.
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#9I'm really grateful to Alex Ellis for his gist[0] to install kubernetes on RPis. I built my own 4 nodes cluster following this gist. It's been great to get my hands dirty with kubernetes
That being said, I had to buy an Asus Tinkerboard with 2GB RAM to serve as the cluster master because 1GB RAM was a bit short. My master node went below 100MB of free RAM and pod evictions (of kube-system pods) started to happen. If I were to do it again, I think I would use only Tinkerboards just for the convenience of having the same OS/hardware on each node.
[0] https://gist.github.com/alexellis/fdbc90de7691a1b9edb545c17d...
Re: Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
#10Wouldn't doing something like this with FPGAs be ultimately cheaper and more efficient. Sure, it will have a big overhead to learn, build and set up your FPGAs specifically for your problem, but that seems like a constant time overhead?