Raspberry Pi Server Mark III • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#61

Post by rwmj » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

th3h4mm3r wrote: post #3

What could you do with a similar setup? I mean: what's the purpose and/or the advantages compared to a "classical" solution ?

I bought a Turing Pi 1 . It's a 7 node mini-cluster, not very expensive (I think about £300 fully populated), that fits into an MiniITX-style case with a single small power supply and single ethernet exposed to the world. You can easily pick the thing up with one hand. It's certainly not powerful, each node is a very modest ARM processor with "only" a gigabyte of RAM and 8 GB of local storage.

The alternatives are much more powerful, but far more expensive and not very attractive in other ways. Blade server? Huge, noisy, power-hungry and I wouldn't get much change from many thousands of pounds. Rack of NUCs? Powerful of course but far more expensive, large, separate power bricks, ethernet switch and lots of wiring required. VMs running on a desktop? Still more expensive, larger, and not the same tangible experience as having a real cluster. VMs on a laptop? Laptops at the same price point would have too little RAM to run lots of VMs well.

So these Raspberry Pi clusters fit a niche which is not well served by other solutions.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#62

Post by thetanil » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

GeertJohan wrote: post #48

thetanil wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi does not do poe natively. POE is available as a hat, but I have not seen one for the Pi4 yet. The hats are nearly as expensive as the Pi itself.

I'm using the existing PoE hat on several Pi4's in a production environment and it works great. Never had shutdowns or issues with power. Note that I'm not drawing extra power from any of the USB ports, so perhaps the existing PoE hat isn't sufficient when you have USB devices attached to the pi4.

Good to know. I couldn't see any reason that they wouldn't work for a Pi4, but I couldn't find a single manufacturer that said Pi4 was actually supported.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#63

Post by bufferoverflow » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

Can someone explain what the point is? Can't you just gets a multicore xeon off eBay really cheap and get more performance for less money?

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#64

Post by thetanil » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #63

Can someone explain what the point is? Can't you just gets a multicore xeon off eBay really cheap and get more performance for less money?

cloud style microservice architectures. saves a lot of power and no single node is carrying all the weight. distributed computing is scalable. 1 big xeon is not.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#65

Post by arnd » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

throwaway4good wrote: post #21

rovr138 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on the task.

I challenge you to find a single application where a setup of 14 raspberry pi's will beat the new mac mini.

It was apparently built for a very specific use case (doing CI for some application) so I guess it has to be ARM Linux. You can run Linux in a VM guest on Mac mini, but some limitations remain:

- The project was obviously started before the Mac mini was available

- Linux guests are still rather experimental and might not behave the same way as a real machine.

- 32-bit Arm applications do not run on the M1, it is a 64-bit-only CPU

- Nested virtualization is said to not work yet under MacOS, so you cannot run KVM guests inside of the Linux guest

- If you need to spin up lots OS instances simultaneously to test various setups and each of them need 8GB, you can have at most 2 instances on a Mac.

For most use cases, none of those apply, so you would be better off with a Mac, a Graviton instance or an off-the-shelf PC.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#66

Post by ak39 » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

This is so exciting. Is this type of "movement" (trend) likely to see data centers coming back on premises for enteprise markets? (ie. back from cloud)

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#67

Post by tutfbhuf » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

thetanil wrote: post #40

ansible wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to learn clustering with physical hardware, and you don't have the power and size constraints, you're better off buying some off-lease business desktops. These i3 and i5 systems with 4 to 8GB of RAM can be had for less than $100 each. When you're done with the cluster, you can likely sell them for nearly what you paid for them.

i think you will lose in the end this way if you actually factor in power costs.

Yup, 6x old i5 thinkpads will require more space, more power and will likely be more expensive than 6x Pi.

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#68

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #10

canofbars wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its cool and fun and teaches you a skill at a low price point. There is essentially no functional reason to do this over a single high power server unless for some reason you need a bunch of ARM servers for something.

All fourteen Pis, even v4s (which are significantly hungrier), would be lower power (as in electrical draw) than even a feeble (as in compute power) traditional machine. If you can distribute your workload (or it's not intensive anyway), i.e. having no single machine with a faster processor, then I think it's a good choice, cheaper to run. Edit: I'm happy to be corrected if down-voters would like to reply... A Pi 4 d…

[deleted]

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#69

Post by andreareina » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

thetanil wrote: post #62

GeertJohan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using the existing PoE hat on several Pi4's in a production environment and it works great. Never had shutdowns or issues with power. Note that I'm not drawing extra power from any of the USB ports, so perhaps the existing PoE hat isn't sufficient when you have USB devices attached to the pi4.

Good to know. I couldn't see any reason that they wouldn't work for a Pi4, but I couldn't find a single manufacturer that said Pi4 was actually supported.

Hat on the official site [1] explicitly says the 4B is supported.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/

Re: Raspberry Pi Server Mark III

#70

Post by epmaybe » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

thetanil wrote: post #54

ArtWomb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I recently spied the 4 node Jetson Mate carrier board on CNX that facilitates building your own Multi GPU cluster ;) https://www.seeedstudio.com/Jetson-Mate-Cooling-Kit-p-4784.h... They recommend Kubernetes for private cloud workloads. But I am wondering if there isn't room in the ecosystem for a new virtualization / containerization technology to orchestrate tasks on multi gpus? Have heard NVidia is developing…

yeah, I'm excited to get my hands on some Jetsons too. the 4gb memory on the pi is really a big pro though. when one of these SBCs finally comes with 8GB and GPU acceleration for < 100$ we will see some real progress I think.

Pi comes with 8gb ram now