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I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#131

Post by qhwudbebd »

jonatron wrote: post #93
deadbabe wrote: post #66

I really don’t understand the hype over raspberry Pi. It’s an overrated, overhyped little computer. Like ok it’s small I guess but why is it the default that everyone wants to build something new on? Because it’s cheap? Whatever happened to buy once, cry once? Why not just build an actual powerful rig? For your NAS? For your firewalls? For security cameras? For your local AI agents?

In the category of SBC's, it's pretty much the only one that has good software support, not outdated images made with a bunch of kernel patches for a specific kernel version.

This is certainly the reputation but I'm not sure they deserve it. They've always had the horrible closed-source bootloader with threadx running on the gpu, without a free alternative. At least up to pi4 they weren't bad at linux mainlining, but progress on upstreaming pi5 support has been glacial.

Cf. the various Beagle boards which have mainline linux and u-boot support right from release, together with real open hardware right down to board layouts you can customise. And when you come to manufacture something more than just a dev board, you can actually get the SoC from your normal distributor and drop it on your board - unlike the strange Broadcom SoCs rpi use.

I'm quite a lot more positive about rp2040 and rp2350, where they've at least partially broken free of that Broadcom ball-and-chain.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#132

Post by theultdev »

deadbabe wrote: post #87
theultdev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use mine for a plex server. I don't need to transcode + I need something I can leave on that draws little power. I have a powerful rig, but the one time I get to turn it off is when I'd need the media server lol. There's a lot of scenarios where power usage comes into play. These clusters don't make much sense to me though.

That’s insane, drawing very little power from an always on server is a solved problem.

how many can run on batteries?

it's nice to take it on road trips / into hotels.

can't really imagine hauling a server around.

we probably have different definitions of "very little power".

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#134

Post by cjbgkagh »

Almondsetat wrote: post #130
nine_k wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably consume $150 worth of electricity in less than a month, even sitting idle :-\

Isn't your home lab supposed to make you learn stuff? Why would you leave it idle?

You wouldn’t, it’s given as a lower bound, it costs more than that when not idling

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#135

Post by Waraqa »

wltr wrote: post #48
phoronixrly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were cost competitive for ... anything at all really...

Well I have a Pi as a home server, and it’s very energy efficient, while doing what I want. Since I don’t need latest and greatest (I don’t see any difference with a modern PC for my use case), it’s very competitive for me. No need for any cooling is bonus.

>very energy efficient

If your server has a lot of idle time, ARM will always win.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#137

Post by lukevp »

mercutio2 wrote: post #122
rogerrogerr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100W over a month (rule of thumb 730 hours) is 73kWh. Which is $7.30 at my $0.10/kWh rate, or less than $25 at (what Google told me is) Cali’s average $0.30/kWh.

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents. Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners. Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

60 cents per kWh? That’s shocking. Here in Oregon people complain about energy prices and my fully loaded cost (not the per kWh but including everything) is 19c. And I go over the limit for single family residential where I end up in a higher priced bracket. Thanks for making me feel better about my electricity rate. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. The utility companies should have to pay to cover those costs.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#138

Post by alias_neo »

TZubiri wrote: post #115
Aurornis wrote: post #17

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks. If your goal is to play…

Fun fact, a raspberry pi does not have a built in Real Time Clock with its own battery, so it relies on network clocks to keep the time. Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation. Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not poss…

> the raspberry pi is still an amazingly cost effective choice

It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up.

If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually already in mini-PC price territory and you can get something much more capable and feature complete for about the same price, or for a few £ more, something significantly more capable, better CPU, iGPU, you'll get an RTC, proper networking, faster storage, more RAM, better cooling, etc, etc, and you won't be using much more electricity either.

I went this route myself and have figuratively and literally shelved a bunch of Pis by replacing them with a MiniPC.

My conclusion, for my own use, after a decade of RPi use, is that a cheap mini PC is the better option these days for hosting/services/server duty and Pis are better for making/tinkering/GPIO related stuff, even size isn't a winner for the Pi any more with the size of some of the mini-PCs on the market.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#139

Post by cogman10 »

mercutio2 wrote: post #122
rogerrogerr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100W over a month (rule of thumb 730 hours) is 73kWh. Which is $7.30 at my $0.10/kWh rate, or less than $25 at (what Google told me is) Cali’s average $0.30/kWh.

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents. Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners. Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

Depends entirely on the utilities board doing the regulation.

That said, I'm of the opinion that power/water/internet should all be state/county/city ran. I don't want my utilities companies to have profit motives.

My water company just got bought up by a huge water company conglomerate and, you guessed it, immediate rate increases.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#140

Post by mattbillenstein »

bunderbunder wrote: post #20
Aurornis wrote: post #17

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks. If your goal is to play…

The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.

LOL, no
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