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Raspberry Pi Colocation

pi-colocation.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#61

Post by YPPH »

xg15 wrote: post #55
glenneroo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything benefiting from a static IP address, such as running your own VPN, mail server, Bitcoin node, TOR node... the latter of which got me banned by my bank's security team because I was marked as "suspicious traffic" (wasn't even an exit node) - preventing me from using online banking. Talking to support proved fruitless, however the ban was lifted as soon as I changed my IP address.

Note that the IP address is shared with other PIs and there are restrictions on which ports you can use: https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/

That's a really big caveat - thanks for flagging it.

Looks like web hosting or a mail server is completely out of the question.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#62

Post by AshamedCaptain »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

I like the idea in theory, but I can’t entirely agree with the “Green” designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12 switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above adds up quickly. From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud workloads, I’d still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead for individual wor…

Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management support, making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#63

Post by tata71 »

my123 wrote: post #38
solarkraft wrote: post #26

I'm gonna ask the dumb/obvious question: Why would I want this? It's certainly not for the compute. Isn't the point of a Raspberry Pi controlling periphery on the edge? But that's not possible here? ??? It's not even needing ARM cores, as those are now cheaply offered by all the cloud computing companies. Is it just for some cheap fun? But if I'm going to host something on cheap amateur grade hardware, why would I no…

Small unit of dedicated hardware, without any other tenants on that same host.

Hugely underrated comment.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#64

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

aofeisheng wrote: post #59

> What is the traffic limit? > It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi. > What is the data transfer rate? > The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry. It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.

>It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.

I mean, not to disagree here, but that's pretty much the average internet speed in some third world countries, like Austria for example. :)

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#65

Post by KennyBlanken »

whalesalad wrote: post #19

This is neat but from a scaling perspective it doesn’t make sense. A single server grade Xeon chip can expose the same compute power as a cluster of these devices, with better performance across the board (memory access, peripherals, etc) Just trying to grok a legit use case?

The use case is greenwashing and separating people from their money because everyone thinks Pis are just the bee's knees.

The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...so in theory a 5600x is twice as energy efficient as a Pi4 if fully loaded. Sure this doesn't account for system fans and the motherboard, but they don't use that much compared to the CPU.

The whole point of virtualization is that most systems are idle a lot of the time. At datacenter scale virtualization, you can dramatically over-provision and shut down/sleep unnecessary nodes, firing them up when you need to. You can get near 100% utilization on your hardware, making the very most of every watt that doesn't go to actually computing.

Here they're going to have a zillion Pi4's, most of them sitting idle, but still using a couple watts. They're not even bothering to use any sort of shared power to improve PSU efficiency. They're not even bothering to use Pi4 compute modules.

Now, the interesting bit is that now there's the Pi Zero Wireless 2. It has nearly the compute power of the 3B+, but the highest energy efficiency per watt of any Pi board so far...

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#66

Post by walrus01 »

I think I'd rather have a decently specced KVM VM on a x86-64 hypervisor somewhere, I can run mainline debian on, for $6/mo than a raspberry pi. For that money if you look you can get something with 2 pseudo cores, 2 gigs of ram, and probably 40GB of storage.

At least I can have more confidence that the storage won't spontaneously fail, and network throughput greater than 10 Mbps.

This seems like a cool idea and all and it's certainly cheap for hobby projects. But I wonder how viable it really is as a business model. Doing the math on person-hour costs if just one pi requires 15 minutes of support/human attention from a person at the ISP, once, you're losing money on that customer forever.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#68

Post by Sebb767 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

I like the idea in theory, but I can’t entirely agree with the “Green” designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12 switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above adds up quickly. From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud workloads, I’d still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead for individual wor…

Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management support, making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips.

> making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips

What x86 chip can idle on 4W when including RAM and the mainboard?

I have some very low power J1900 boards, but even they idle on ~10W.

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#69

Post by tiagod »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #64
aofeisheng wrote: post #59

> What is the traffic limit? > It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi. > What is the data transfer rate? > The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry. It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.

>It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough. I mean, not to disagree here, but that's pretty much the average internet speed in some third world countries, like Austria for example. :)

So, a single person in such country would be enough to saturate the server...

Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation

#70

Post by [deleted] »

aofeisheng wrote: post #59

> What is the traffic limit? > It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi. > What is the data transfer rate? > The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry. It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.

[deleted]
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