251–260 of 377 posts
Guys, don’t take the claim so literally. He’s a successful tech poster. He makes good money showing off his purchases the good money complaining about how expensive they were. But certainly don’t imitate his choices, his economics aren’t your economics!
Frankly, always thought about Pi Clusters as a nerd indulgence, something to play, not to do serious work.
It reminds me of the Beowulf clusters of the 90s-2000s, that were all the rage at some point, then slowly lost ground... I remember many friends tinkering with some variant of those, we had one in Uni, and there were even some linux distros dedicated to the concept.
Guys, don’t take the claim so literally. He’s a successful tech poster. He makes good money showing off his purchases the good money complaining about how expensive they were. But certainly don’t imitate his choices, his economics aren’t your economics!
Thats pretty much a given, but what the real takeaway should be from most of the content is that whatever you are doing, these days the answer in all likelihood is not to buy a raspberry pi. It's specs to price just do not add up at all anymore, and it's looking like a pretty damn stagnant place these days.
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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.
A lot of business are paying obscene money to cloud providers when they could have a pair of racks and the staff to support it.
Unless you're paying attention to the bleeding edge of the server market, to its costs (better yet features and affordability) this sort of mistake is easy to make.
The article is by someone who does this sort of thing for fun, and views/attention, and im glad for it... it's fun to watch. But it's sad when this same sort of misunderstanding happens in professional settings, and it happens a lot.
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…
What I think is strange with stuff like this that you should be able to come to that conclusion without technical knowledge. Just the fact that everyone runs AI on GPUs and NVIDIAs stock skyrocketed since the AI boom should tell you s.th.. Did OP really think his fellow humans are that moronic that they just didn't find out you can plug in together a cuple of rasperri pis?
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.
This. Some cloud providers offer VMs with 4GB RAM and 2 virtual cores for less than $4/month. If your goal is to learn how to work with clusters, nothing beats firing up a dozen VMs when it suits your fancy, and shut them down when playtime is over. This is something you can pull off in a couple of minutes with something like an Ansible script.
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> Like if you have a large media library, you need to push maybe 10MB/s, For just streaming a 4k bluray you need more than 10MB/s, Ultra HD bluray tops out at 144 Mbit/s. Not to mention if that system is being hit by something else at the same time (backup jobs, etc...). Is the 128GB of RAM just hardware porn? Eh, maybe, probably. But if you want 8+ bays for a decent sized NAS then you're already quickly into price p…
For 8+ bays you just need a SAS HBA card and one free PCI-E slot. Not to mention that many motherboards will have 6+ SATA ports already. If anything, 2nd hand AMD gaming rigs make more sense than old servers. I say that as someone with always off r720xd at home due to noise and heat. It was fun when I bought it during winter years ago, until summer came.
And what case are you putting them into? What if you want it rack mounted? What about >1gig networking? What if I want a GPU in there to do whisper for home assistant?
Used gaming rigs are great. But used servers also still have loads of value, too. Compute just isn't one of them.
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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 al…
Zero of any of that is needed. The new Pi "works best" with a cooler sure but at standard room temps will be fine for serving web apps and custom projects and things. You do not need an SSD. You do not need a HAT for anything.
Apparently the Pi 5 8gb is $120 though WTF.
What personal web site or web app or project can't run just fine on a Pi Zero 2 though? It's a little RAM starved but performance wise it should be sufficient.
Other than second-hand mini PCs, old laptops also make great home servers. They have built in UPS!
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Not OP, but my California TOU rates are between a 40 and 70 cents per kWh. Still only $50/month, not $150, but I very much care about 100W loads doing no work.
Those kWh prices are insane, that’ll make industry move out of there.
That said, I am not sure those numbers are true. I am in California (PG&E with East Bay community generation), and my TOU rates are much lower than those.
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…
Geerling's titles have been increasingly click-bait for a while now. It's pretty sad, because I like his content, but hate the click-bait BS.
Youtube demonstrably wants clickbait titles and thumbnails. They built tooling to automatically A/B test titles and thumbnails for you.
Youtube could fix this and stop it if they want, but that might lose them 1% of business so they never will.
They love that you blame creators for this market dynamic instead of the people who literally create the market dynamic.