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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

#151

Post by maartin0 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #98
Coffeewine wrote: post #6

It'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.

That's the biggest regret; but I've backed 6 Kickstarter projects over the years. Median time to deliver is 1 year. Somehow I've actually gotten every item I backed shipped at some point (which is unexpected). Hardware startups are _hard_, and after interacting with a number of them (usually one or two people with a neat idea in an underserved market), it seems like more than half fail before delivering their first r…

Not completely related, but do you know if hardware kickstarters typically have any IP protection? I'm surprised there haven't been any cases of large companies creating patents for ideas from kickstarter at least that I've seen

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#153

Post by stanac »

titaniumtown wrote: post #148
pluto_modadic wrote: post #118

[flagged]

Can you elaborate? I don't know what you are referring to.

Quick google search, Jeff has a blog post about abortion, I haven't read it, but it starts with a warning:

> This post is more than 10 years old, I do not delete posts...

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/articles/religion/abortion-case...

I guess GP is referring to that post.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#154

Post by mattbillenstein »

kllrnohj wrote: post #117
kbenson wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? That seems like something I would want to take advantage if at the moment...

Note the E5-2690V4 is a 10 year old CPU, they are talking about used servers. You can find those on ebay or whatever as well as stores specializing in that. Depending on where you live, you might even find them free as they are often considered literal ewaste by the companies decommissioning them. It also means it performs like a 10 year old server CPU, so those 28 threads are not exactly worth a lot. The geekbench r…

This is the correct analysis - there's a reason you see this stuff cheap or free.

The homelab group on Reddit is full of people who don't understand any of this - they have full racks in their house that could be replaced with one high-end desktop.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#155

Post by Aurornis »

Almondsetat wrote: post #33
bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150. If you need cores and memory to make a lot of VMs you can do it extremely cheaply

> I can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150.

If the goal is a lot of RAM and you don’t care about noise, power, or heat then these can be an okay deal.

Don’t underestimate how far CPUs have come, though. That machine will be slower than AMD’s slowest entry-level CPU. Even an AMD 5800X will double its single core performance and even walk away from it on multithreaded tasks despite only having 8 cores. It will use less electricity and be quiet, too. More expensive, but if this is something you plan to leave running 24/7 the electricity costs over a few years might make the power hungry server more expensive over time.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#157

Post by cjbgkagh »

dijit wrote: post #145
cjbgkagh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

but then you’d turn it off, if you don’t then cloud is much more expensive too. Also $150 for 100w is crazy, thats like $1.70 per kWh; it would cost about $150 a year at the (high) rates of southern Sweden.

Im not the OP, don’t know how they arrived at that cost.

Personally it’s cheaper to buy the hardware that does spend most of its time idling. Fast turnaround on very large private datasets being key.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#158

Post by bee_rider »

> The first benchmark I ran was my top500 High Performance Linpack cluster benchmark. This is my favorite cluster benchmark, because it's the traditional benchmark they'd run on massive supercomputers to get on the top500 supercomputer list. […]

> After fixing the thermals, the cluster did not throttle, and used around 130W. At full power, I got 325 Gflops

I was sort of surprised to find that the top500 list on their website only goes back to 1993. I was hoping to find some ancient 70’s version of the list where his ridiculous Pi cluster could sneak on. Oh well, might as well take a look… I’ll pull from the sub-lists of

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/

They give the top 10 immediately.

First list (June 1993):

     placement  name            RPEAK (GFlop/s)
     1          CM-5/1024       131.00
     10         Y-MP C916/16256 15.24
Last list he wins, I think (June 1996):

     1          SR2201/1024     307.20  
     10         SX-4/32         64.00
First list he’s bumped out of the top 10 (November 1997):

     1          ASCI Red        1,830.40
     10         T3E             326.40
I think he gets bumped off the full top500 list around 2002-2003. Unfortunately I made the mistake of going by Rpeak here, but they sort by Rmax, and I don’t want to go through the whole list.

Apologies for any transcription errors.

Actually, pretty good showing for such a silly cluster. I think I’ve been primed by stuff like “your watch has more compute power than the Apollo guidance computer” or whatever to expect this sort of thing to go way, way back, instead of just to the 90’s.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#159

Post by SoftTalker »

cogman10 wrote: post #139
mercutio2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most utilities, even if ostensibly privately-owned, are profit-limited and rates must be approved by a regulatory board. Some are organized as non-profits (rural water and electric co-ops, etc.) This is in exchange for the local monopoly.

If your local regulators approved the merger and higher rates, your complaint is with them as much as the utility company.

Not saying that some regulators are not basically rubber stamps or even corrupt.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#160

Post by wizzwizz4 »

aprdm wrote: post #61
phoronixrly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What have you created ? Nothing that is not AGPL-licensed, so you and your company haven't taken advantage of it. I am not sure how this relates to my comment though.

[flagged]

GP is not Jeff Geerling.
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