I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
jeffgeerling.com
I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
1–10 of 377 posts
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#2Frankly, always thought about Pi Clusters as a nerd indulgence, something to play, not to do serious work.
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#3If Pi Clusters were actually cost competitive for performance there would be data centres full of them.
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#4Frankly, always thought about Pi Clusters as a nerd indulgence, something to play, not to do serious work.
After a few years of experience with them I agree for the most part. They are great for individual projects and even as individual servers for certain loads, but once you start clustering them you will probably get better results from a purpose built computer in the same price range as multiple pis.
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#5Was it cost effective? Meh.
Was it a learning experience?
More importantly, did you have some fun? Just a little? (=
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#6It's a pretty rough headline, clearly the author had fun performing the test and constructing the thing.
I would be pretty regretful of just the first sentence in the article, though:
> I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago.
That's rough.
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#7Wow that's a lot of scratch for... scratch. Pays for itself, I'm sure: effective bait :)
'Worth it any more'? At this size, never. A Pi is a Pi is a Pi!
A few are fine for toying around; beyond that, hah. Price:perf is rough, does not improve with multiplication [of units, cost, or complexity].
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#8Fun project. Was the author hoping for cost effective performance?!
I assumed this was a novelty, like building a RAID array out of floppy drives.
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#9If Pi Clusters were actually cost competitive for performance there would be data centres full of them.
If they were cost competitive for ... anything at all really...
Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
#10Frankly, always thought about Pi Clusters as a nerd indulgence, something to play, not to do serious work.
I think the only exception is specifically for studying network/communciation-topologies.
I've seen a couple clusters (ca. 10-50 Pi's) in universities for both research and teaching.