[HN Gopher] Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives ___________________________________________________________________ Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives Author : mikece Score : 52 points Date : 2023-01-23 15:27 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com) | exabrial wrote: | I really want something like NVidia's upcoming Grace CPU in blade | format, but something where I can provision a chunk of SSD | storage off a SAN via some sort of PCI-E backplane. Same form | factor like the linked project. | | I'm noticing that our JVM workloads execute _significantly_ | faster on ARM. Just looking at the execution times on our lowly | first-gen M1s Macbooks is significantly better than some of our | best Intel or AMD hardware we have racked. I'm guessing it all | has to do with Memory bandwidth. | robotburrito wrote: | This is cool. But it's super hard to compete w/ a computer you | bought off craigslist for 25$. | ilyt wrote: | I always wanted such thing for various "plumbing" services | (DHCP/DNS/wifi controller etc) but lack of ECC and OOB management | kinda disqualifies it for anything serious. | | >He's running forty Blades in 2U. That's: > | > 160 ARM cores > 320 GB of RAM > | (up to) 320 terabytes of flash storage > | | >...in 2U of rackspace. | | Yay that's like... almost as much as normal 1U server can do | | Edit: I give up, HN formatting is idiotic | LeonM wrote: | > I always wanted such thing for various "plumbing" services | (DHCP/DNS/wifi controller etc) | | You don't need a cluster for that, even a 1st gen Pi can run | those services without any problem. | guntherhermann wrote: | I can only speak for Raspi 3B+, but I agree. | | I have multiple services running on it (including pihole, | qbittorrent, vpn) and it's at about 40% mem usage right now. | timerol wrote: | Also not noted: 320 TB in 40 M.2 drives will be extremely | expensive. Newegg doesn't have any 8 TB M.2 SSDs under $1000. | $0.12/GB is about twice as expensive as more normally-sized | drives, to say nothing of the price of spinning rust. | bee_rider wrote: | Just the Pi's are $35 a pop, right? So that's $1400 of Pi's, on | top of whatever the rest of the stuff costs. Wonder how it | compares to, I guess, a whatever the price equivalent AMD | workstation chip is... | philsnow wrote: | It seems they're the ones with 8 GB of ram, so probably | closer to $75 each. | bee_rider wrote: | I'd be interested to see if anyone had any application | other than CI for Raspberry Pi programs, I really can't see | one. | singron wrote: | It's actually 3U since the 2U of 40 pis will need almost an | entire 1U 48 port PoE switch instead of plugging into the TOR. | The switch will use 35-100W for itself depending on features | and conversion losses. If each pi uses more than 8-9W or so | under load, then you might actually need a second PoE switch. | | If you are building full racks, it probably makes more sense to | use ordinary systems, but if you want to have a lot of actual | hardware isolation at a smaller scale, it could make sense. | | In some colos, they don't give you enough power to fill up your | racks, so the low energy density wouldn't be such a bummer | there. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I do think this is sort of fool's gold in terms of actual | performance. Even though the core count and RAM size is | impressive, those cores are talking over ethernet rather than | system bus. | | Latency and bandwidth is atrocious in comparison, and you're | going to run into problems like no individual memory allocation | being able to exceed 8 Gb. | | Like for running a hundred truly independent jobs then sure, | maybe you'll get equivalent performance, but that's a very | unique scenario that is rare in the real world. | DrBazza wrote: | It probably lends itself to tasks where CPU time is much | greater than network round trip. Maybe scientific problems | that massively parallel. Way back in the 90s I worked with | plasma physics guys that used a parallel system on "slow" Sun | boxes. I can't remember the name of the software though. | varispeed wrote: | I built such a toy cluster once to see for my self and gave | up. It is too slow to do anything serious. You can be much | better off by just buying older post lease server. Sure it | will consume more power, but conversely you will finish more | tasks in shorter time, so advantage of using ARM in that case | may be negligible. If it was Apple's M1 or M2, that would | have been a different story though. RPi4 and clones are not | there yet. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I overall think people tend to underestimate the overhead | of clustering. It's always significantly faster to run a | computation on one machine than spread over N machines with | hardware of (1/N) power. | | That's not always a viable option because of hardware | costs, and sometimes you want redundancy, but those | concerns are on an orthogonal axis to performance. | jbverschoor wrote: | Well, a complete M1 board, which is basically about as | large as half an iPhone mini, is fast enough. It's also | super efficient. So I'm still waiting for Apple to | announce their cloud. | | They're currently putting Mx chips in every device they | have, even the monitors. It'll be the base system for any | electric device. I'm sure we'll see more specialized | devices for different applications, because at this | point, the hardware is compact, fast, and secure enough | for anything, as well as the software stack. | | Hello Apple Fridge | marginalia_nu wrote: | Fast enough for what? | convolvatron wrote: | Lines gets blurred when you are on a supercomputer | interconnect and a global address space or even rdma | dekhn wrote: | the fastest practical interconnects are roughly 1/10th | the speed of local RAM. Because of that, if you use | interconnect, you don't use it for remote RAM (through | virtual memory). | | I don't think anybody in the HPC business really pursued | mega-SMP after SGI because it was not cost-effective for | the gains. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | >I do think this is sort of fool's gold in terms of actual | performance. | | It's a fun toy for learning (and clicks, let's be honest). | | It's not a serious attempt at a high performance cluster or | an exercise in building an optimal computing platform. | | Enjoy the experiment and the uniqueness of it. Nobody is | going to be choosing this as their serious compute platform. | analognoise wrote: | In TFA, isn't Jetbrains using it as a CI system? | lmz wrote: | Unless they need something Pi specific I don't understand | why this would be preferable versus just virtualizing | instances on a "big ARM" server. I'm sure those exist. | bee_rider wrote: | Tangential, but it is so funny to me that "TFA" has | become a totally polite and normal way to refer to the | linked article on this site. Expanding that acronym would | really change the tone! | OJFord wrote: | I'm not sure it is 'totally polite'? I usually read it as | having a 'did you even open it' implication that 'OP' or | 'the submission' doesn't. Maybe that's just me. | bee_rider wrote: | Maybe it isn't _totally_ polite, but it IMO it reads in | this case more like slight correction than "In the | fucking article," which would be pretty aggressive, haha. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > but lack of ECC and OOB management kinda disqualifies it for | anything serious. | | > Yay that's like... almost as much as normal 1U server can do | | It's a fun toy. _Obviously_ it isn't the best or most efficient | way to get any job done. That's not the point. | | Enjoy it for the fun experiment that it is. | FlyingAvatar wrote: | I think the hardware isolation would be a selling point in some | cases. Granted, it's niche. | [deleted] | xattt wrote: | But does anyone remember the Beowulf trope(1) from Slashdot? Am | I a greybeard now? | | (1) https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/can- | you... | neilv wrote: | To go along with "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!", don't | forget "Take my money!" | Koshkin wrote: | You can get off my lawn now. | iamflimflam1 wrote: | But does it run Doom? | mejutoco wrote: | Crysis | cptnapalm wrote: | What does Natalie Portman need to imagine a Beowulf | cluster of Dooms running Crysis? Grits? | mometsi wrote: | I like user _big.ears_ ' speculation on what someone could | possibly do with that much parallel compute: | I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't | build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, | 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in | Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know | what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is | interesting. | edoloughlin wrote: | I do and you are. I'm also imagining one covered in hot | grits... | trollied wrote: | Don't forget the Hot Grits & Natalie Portman. | pdpi wrote: | Beowulf clusters were those lame things that didn't have | wireless, and had less space than a nomad, right? | pjmlp wrote: | I do. And cool research OSes that did process migration. | nine_k wrote: | Ah, Plan 9. | wiredfool wrote: | And God help us, OS2/Warp. | pjmlp wrote: | With much better tooling for OO ABI than COM/WinRT will | ever get (SOM). | zozbot234 wrote: | I'm not sure that Plan 9 does process migration out of | the box. It does have complete "containerization" by | default, i.e. user-controlled namespacing of all OS | resources - so snapshotting and migration could be a | feasible addition to it. | | Distributed shared memory is another intriguing | possibility, particularly since large address spaces are | now basically ubiquitous. It would allow users to | seamlessly extend multi-threaded workloads to run on a | cluster; the OS would essentially have to implement | memory-coherence protocols over the network. | nine_k wrote: | If not Plan 9, then likely Inferno. (A pretty different | system, of course.) | infinite8s wrote: | It's too bad Apple never bought Gerry Popek's LOCUS | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCUS), which could do | process migration between heterogeneous hardware! | bradleyy wrote: | So, I once met a guy named Don. | | We were hanging out in the garage of a mutual friend, | chatting. Got to the "what do you do" section of the | conversation, and he says he works in massively parallel | stuff at XYZ corp. Something something, GPUs. | | I make the obvious "can you make a Beowulf cluster?" joke, to | which he responds (after a pregnant pause), "you... do know | who I am?" | | Yep. Donald Becker. A slightly awkward moment, I'll cherish | forever. | Quequau wrote: | I do but in all fairness, I have an entirely grey beard. | KingOfCoders wrote: | Grey! Mine is white. | b33j0r wrote: | Sure do! It is interesting that these technologies evolve | more slowly than it seems, sometimes. | | On the graybearding of the cohort, here's a weird one to me. | These days, I mention slashdot and get more of a response | from peers than mentioning digg! | | In 2005, I totally thought digg would be around forever as | the slashdot successor, but it's almost like it never | happened (to software professionals... er, graybeards) | flyinghamster wrote: | You and me both. The funny thing is, I wound up writing a | program that would benefit from clustering, and felt my way | around setting up MPICH on my zoo. I laughed out loud when I | realized that, after all these years, I'd built an impromptu | Beowulf cluster, even though the machines are scattered | around the house. | | Installing MPICH from source instead of from your | distribution is best if you can't have all your cluster | members running the same version of the same distro and/or | have multiple architectures to contend with. But it takes | forever to compile, even on a fast machine. | lemper wrote: | yeah, wanted to replicate something like that by proposing a | hardware vendor who visited my uni. decades ago. didn't go | nowhere because i was intimidated by the red-tapes. | pbronez wrote: | New to me - found the source article in the Wayback Machine: | | https://web.archive.org/web/20010715201416/http://www.scient. | .. | pbronez wrote: | Found the definition: | | Sterling and his Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker | connected 16 PCs, each containing an Intel 486 | microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet | network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster | delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops--that is, | 70 million floating-point operations per second. Though | modest by today's standards, this speed was not much lower | than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers | available at the time. And the cluster was built for only | $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable | commercial machine in 1994. | | NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the | lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant | monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms. | Since then, the name has been widely adopted to refer to | any low-cost cluster constructed from commercially | available PCs. | faichai wrote: | Natalie Portman says yes, and instructs you to put some hot | grits down your pants. | wrldos wrote: | It remember building a 4 node Beowulf cluster out of | discarded compaq desktops and then having no idea what to do | with it. | red-iron-pine wrote: | Did kinda the same thing but with Raspberry Pis. Neat, a | cluster of r-pi's... now what? | ipsin wrote: | If you want to continue the chain of specific goals in | service of no specific purpose: run Kubernetes on it. | Sebb767 wrote: | Then add ArgoCD for deployment and istio for a service | mesh! | | While you are at it, also setup Longhorn for storage. | With that solved, you might as well start hosting Gitea | and DroneCI on the cluster, plus an extra helm- and | docker repo for good measure. And in no time you will | have a full modern CI/CD setup to do nothing but updates | on! :-) | | Seriously, though, you will learn a lot of things in the | process and get a bottom up view of current stacks, which | is definitely helpful. | wrldos wrote: | I did this. I am still dead inside. Thank goodness all my | production shit has a managed control plane and network. | mkj wrote: | 75mhz, yeah! Stacked on top of each other! With 10mbit | ethernet! I think we got OpenMosix going even. | | But then 5 years later I was working on them for a living | in HPC, but they were no longer called Beowulf Clusters | then. | goodpoint wrote: | > Yay that's like... almost as much as normal 1U server can do | | ...but the normal server is much cheaper. | imtringued wrote: | Didn't AMD announce a 96 core processor with dual socket | support? | | As usual this is either done for entertainment value or to | simulate physical networks (not clusters). | adrian_b wrote: | Intel also has now up to 480 cores in an 8-socket server with | 60 cores per socket, though Sapphire Rapids is handicapped in | comparison with AMD Genoa by much lower clock frequencies and | cache memory sizes. | | However, while the high-core-count CPUs have excellent | performance per occupied volume and per watt, they all have | extremely low performance per dollar, unless you are able to | negotiate huge discounts, when buying them by the thousands. | | Using multiple servers with Ryzen 9 7950X can provide a | performance per dollar many times higher than that of any | current server CPU, i.e. six 16-core 7950X with a total of | 384 GB of unbuffered ECC DDR5-4800 will be both much faster | and much cheaper than one 96-core Genoa with 384 GB of | buffered ECC DDR5-4800. | | Nevertheless, the variant with multiple 7950X is limited for | many applications by either the relatively low amount of | memory per node or by the higher communication latency | between nodes. | | Still, for a small business it can provide much more bang for | the buck, when the applications are suitable for being | distributed over multiple nodes (e.g. code compilation). | cjbgkagh wrote: | This is the exact space I'm in, high cpu low network. By my | estimates it's about 1/4 the cost per CPU operation to use | consumer hardware instead of enterprise. The extra | computers allow for application level redundancy so the | other components can be cheaper as well. | bee_rider wrote: | One problem with 480 cores in single node: 480 cores is a | shitload of cores, who needs more than a single node at | this point? The MPI programmer inside me is having an | existential breakdown. | zaarn wrote: | The 1U server is however likely to use more than 200 Watts of | power that the 40 Blade 2U setup would use. | logifail wrote: | > The 1U server is however likely to use more than 200 Watts | of power | | Q: Why would a 1U server need more than 200W if you're doing | nothing more than basic network services? | | I have mini tower servers that draw a fraction of that at | idle. | zaarn wrote: | The Pi's will be using those 200Watts at near full tilt. | The main use here would be larger computational tasks that | you can easily split up among the blades. Or you run a very | hardware-failure tolerant software service on top. | bluedino wrote: | I have some idle Dell R650's that draw 384W. A couple | drives, buncha RAM, two power supplies, 2 CPU's (Xeon 8358) | logifail wrote: | > Dell R650's that draw 384W | | Umm, I'm not sure I can afford the electricity to run kit | like that :) | | I'm currently awaiting delivery of an Asus PN41 (w/ | Celeron N5100) to use as yet another home server, after a | recommendation from a friend. Be interesting to see how | much it draws at idle! | guntherhermann wrote: | It's ~~four~~ two spaces to get the "code block" style. | like this | | and asterisk for italics (I don't think there is a 'quote' | available, and I'm not sure how they play together. | | * does this work? * Edit: No! Haha *how* | *about* *this* | | Edit: No, no joy there either. | | I agree, it's not the most intuitive formatting syntax I've | come across :) | | I guess we're stuck with BEGIN_QUOTE and END_QUOTE blocks! | teddyh wrote: | It's two spaces. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc | mkl wrote: | From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc | guntherhermann wrote: | _> Yay that 's like... almost as much as normal 1U server can | do_ | | What about cost, and other metrics around cost (power usage, | reliability)? If space is the only factor we care about then it | seems like a loss. | betaby wrote: | What about them? 1U servers from vendors are reliable and | efficient - people use them in production for years. As for | the cost, those hobby-style board are very expensive for | dollars/performance. Indeed I'm not getting why would one | want a cluster of expensive, low spec nodes? | sys42590 wrote: | Indeed, that box here next to my desk draws 50W of electricity | continuously despite being mostly idle. Why? Because it has | ECC. | | Having some affordable low power device with ECC would be a | game changer for me. | | I added affordable to exclude expensive (and noisy) workstation | class laptops with ECC RAM. | namibj wrote: | Most AMD desktop platforms support ECC, and if you don't use | overclocking facilities, they are pretty efficient (though | their chiplet architecture causes idle power draw to be a | good fraction of active power draw, still much less than 50W | though). | Maakuth wrote: | There are Intel Atom CPUs that support ECC. I had a | Supermicro motherboard with a quad core part like that and I | used it as a NAS. It was not that fast, but the power | consumption was very low. | smartbit wrote: | Do you remember how many Watts it was using with idle | disks? | MrFoof wrote: | I personally have at 43-45W idle... | >Corsair SF450 PSU >ASRock Rack X570D4U w/BMC | >AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5750GE (8C 3.2/4.6 GHz) >128GB | DDR4-2666 ECC >Intel XL710-DA1 (40Gbps) | >LSI/Broadcom 9500-8i HBA >64GB SuperMicro SATA | DOM >2 SK Hynix Gold P31, 2TB NVMe SSD >8 | Hitachi 7200rpm, 16TB HDD >3 80mm fans, 2 40mm | fans, CPU cooler | | That was an at the time modern "Zen 3" (using Zen 2 | cores) system on an X570 chipset. The CPU mostly goes in | 1L ultra SFF systems. TDP is 35W, and under stress | testing the CPU tops out around around 38.8-39W. The | onboard BMC is about 3.2-3.3W of power consumption | itself. | | Most data ingest and reads comes from the SSD cache, with | that being more around 60W for high throughput. Under | very high loads (saturating the 40Gbps link) with all | disks going, only hits about 110-120W. | | By comparison, a 6-bay Synology was over double that idle | power consumption, and couldn't come close to that | throughput. | sys42590 wrote: | thanks for the parts list, especially because I think | ASRock Rack paired with a Ryzen Pro offers better | performance than a Supermicro in the same price range. | MrFoof wrote: | There's reasons for that though. | | I could drop a few more watts if ASRock could put | together a decent BIOS where disabling things actually | disables things. | | SuperMicro costs what it does for a reason. | | --- --------- | | If you're looking for a chassis, I'm using a SilverStone | RM21-308, with a Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 cooler, and cut some | SilverStone sound deadening foam for the top panel of the | 2U chassis. | | Aside from disks clicking, it's silent, runs hilariously | cool _(I 3D printed chipset and HBA fan mounts at a local | library)_ and it's more usable storage, higher | performance _(saturates 40Gbps trivially)_ and lower | power consumption than anything any YouTuber has come | remotely close to. That server basically lets me have | everything else in my rack not care much about storage, | because the storage server handles it like a champ. I | really considered doing a video series on it, but I'm too | old to want to deal with the peanut gallery of YouTube | comments. | philsnow wrote: | If you don't mind me asking, how do your other workloads | access the storage on it, NFS? The stumbling block for | NFS for me is identity and access management. | Maakuth wrote: | It was this board: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products | /motherboard/a2sdi-2c-... | | I think it was idling at something like 30-40W with four | HDDs and a UPS. I didn't have an especially efficient PSU | and the UPS must have taken some power too. The | motherboard alone would draw as little as 15W, I suppose. | nsteel wrote: | > Why? Because it has ECC | | Sorry if I am missing the obvious here, but why would ECC | consume so much power? | growse wrote: | It's not that ECC consumes power, it's that systems that | support ECC tend to consume more idle power (because | they're larger etc.) | aidenn0 wrote: | Xeon-D series? | walterbell wrote: | Epyc Embedded and possibly some Ryzen Embedded devices. | stordoff wrote: | How much RAM is that with? My home server idles at ~25-27W, | but that's with only 16GB (EEC DDR4). However, throwing in an | extra 16GB as a test didn't measurably change the reading. | mayli wrote: | That would be 40x (Rpi4 8GB $75 + 8TB nvme $1200 + psu and | others) ~ $51000. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | > Yay that's like... almost as much as normal 1U server can do | | Hyperscale in your _Homelab_. Something to hack on, learn, host | things like Jellyfin, and have fun with. | jeffbee wrote: | I agree but can't you get the same effect with VMWare ESXi? | If I just wanted to "have fun" managing scores of tiny | computers, and I emphasize that this sounds like the least | amount of fun anyone could have, I can have as many virtual | machines as I want. | fishtacos wrote: | I can understand why some people want something | physical/tangible while testing or playing in their hobby | environment. I'm still a fan of virtualization - passmark | scores for an RPi4 (entire SOC/quad core) are 21 times less | than a per-single-core comparison in a 14-core 15-13600k | (as a point of reference, my current system) and while am | running 64GB RAM, can easily upgrade to 128GB or more on a | single DDR4 node. | | Hard to see to an advantage given obvious limitations, | although it may make it more fun to work within latency and | memory constrictions, I guess. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > lack of ECC and OOB management kinda disqualifies it | | Can you expand on this please? | metalspot wrote: | its a nice hobby project, but of course a commercial blade | system will have far higher compute density. supermicro can do | 20 epyc nodes in 8u, which at 64 cores per node is 1280 cores | in 8u, or 160 in 1u, so double the core density, and far more | powerful cores, so way higher effective compute density. | onphonenow wrote: | I've been getting good price/perf just doing the top AMD consumer | CPU's. Wish someone would make an AM5 platform motherboard with | out of band / remote console mgmt. that really is a must if you | have a bunch of boxes and have them somewhere else. The per core | speeds are high on these. 16 core / 32 threads/boxe gets you | enough for a fair bit. | trevorstarick wrote: | Have you taken a look at any of AsrockRack's offerings? They've | got some prelim 650 mATX boards: | https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=B... | 1MachineElf wrote: | Love it, however, I'm skeptical of Raspberry Pi Foundation's | claims that the CM4 supply will improve during 2023. It might | improve for some, but as more novel solutions like these come up, | the supply will never be enough. | Havoc wrote: | I've built a small rasp k3s cluster with pi4 and ssd. It works | fine but one can ultimately still feel that they are quite weak. | Or put differently deploying something on k3s still ends up | deploying on a single node in most cases and this gets single | node performance under most circumstances | nyadesu wrote: | I've been running a cluster like that since some years ago and | definitely felt that, but it was easy to fix by adding AMD64 | nodes to it | | Modifying the services I'm working on to build multi-arch | container images was not as straightforward as I imagined, but | now I can take advantage of both ARM and AMD64 nodes on my | cluster (plus I learned to do that, which is priceless) | Annatar wrote: | [dead] | aseipp wrote: | I love the form factor. But please. For the love of god. We need | something with wide availability that supports at least ARMv8.2. | | At this rate I have so little hope in other vendors that we'll | probably just have to wait for the RPi5. | jdoss wrote: | I think these are fantastic, but I really wish it had a BMC so | one could do remote management. I'd love for version 2 to have it | so I could buy a bunch for my datacenter. | spiritplumber wrote: | I helped write parallelknoppix when I was an undergrad - our | university's 2nd cluster ended up being a bunch of laptops with | broken displays running it. Took me a whole summer. | | Then the next semester I am denied the ability to take a parallel | computing class because it was for graduate students only and the | prof. would not accept a waiver even though the class was being | taught on the cluster me and a buddy built. | | That I still had root on. | | So I added a script that would renice the prof.'s jobs to be as | slow as possible. | | BOFH moment :) | sidewndr46 wrote: | The school I went to had similar but more insane policies | | * I frequently took computer science graduate courses and | received only undergrad. credit because they could not offer | the undergrad course | | * Other majors were default prohibited from taking computer | science courses under the guise of a shortage of places in | classes. Even when those majors required a computer science | course to graduate | | I would like to point out that 300 and 400 level courses in the | CS program usually had no more than 8 students. I distinctly | remember meeting in a closet for one of my classes, because we | had so few students they couldn't justify giving us a | classroom. | | Contrast that with the math department where I wanted to take | some courses in parallel rather than serial. After a short | conversation with the professor he said "ok sure, seems alright | to me". | bionsystem wrote: | Why do you guys think such things happen ? | KRAKRISMOTT wrote: | Academia being inelastic and refusing to adapt in the face | of market forces. | jollyllama wrote: | Other majors were default prohibited from taking computer | science courses under the guise of a shortage of places in | classes. Even when those majors required a computer science | course to graduate | | I went to an institution that did the opposite; seats were | reserved for non-cs majors despite a shortage of sections. | This resulted in CS undergrads waiting for courses just so | they could graduate. It was frustrating because it felt like | the department was taking care of outsiders over its own. | havnagiggle wrote: | That was nice of you! | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | One might even say that it had a very high nice value;) | lemper wrote: | i think i've read this kind of reply before. and i was not | wrong [1]. nice story to tell. too bad my uni. didn't have that | kind of facilities and opportunities. | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197024 | throwaway1777 wrote: | Prof might've done you a favor. Seems like you didn't need that | class anyway. | spiritplumber wrote: | I wanted the credit hours though :) | anonymousDan wrote: | Parallel knoppix sounds cool. Did the os's on each machine | coordinate in any way at the kernel level? Or was it all user | level libs/apps/services? | walrus01 wrote: | If you want "hyperscale" in your homelab, the bare metal | hypervisor needs to be x86-64 because unless you literally work | for Amazon or a few others you are unlikely to be able to | purchase other competitively priced and speedy arm based servers. | | There is still near zero availability in mass market for CPUs you | can stick into motherboards from one of the top ten taiwanese | vendors of serious server class motherboards. | | And don't even get me started on the lack of ability to actually | buy raspberry pi of your desired configuration at a reasonable | price and in stock to hit _add to cart_. | vegardx wrote: | Supermicro launched a whole lineup of ARM-based servers last | fall. They seem to mostly offer complete systems for now, but | as far as I understand that's mostly because there's still some | minor issues to iron out in terms of broader support. | ultra_nick wrote: | I'd like to buy a laptop that's also a fault tolerant cluster. | Saris wrote: | It's too bad ARM boards are so expensive, it makes them nearly | pointless for projects unless you need the GPIO. | Aissen wrote: | Multiple server vendors now have Ampere offerings. In 2U, you can | have: | | * 4 Ampere Altra Max processors (in 2 or 4 servers), so about 512 | cores, and much faster than anything those Raspberry Pi have. | | * lots of RAM, probably about 4TB ? | | * ~92TB of flash storage (or more ?) | | _Edit_ : I didn 't want to disparage the compute blade, it looks | like a very fun project. It's not even the same use case as the | server hardware (and probably the best solution if you need | _actual_ raspberry pis), the only common thread is the 2U and | rack use. | dijit wrote: | those things are insanely expensive though, I priced a 2core | machine at 20,000 EUR without much ram or SSDs. | | I'm keeping my eyes open though. | aeyes wrote: | Try the HPE RL300, should be more reasonably priced but I | couldn't get a quote because availability seems to be | problematic at the moment. | Aissen wrote: | An open secret of the server hardware market: public prices | mean nothing and you can get big discounts, even at low | volume. | | But of course the config I talked about is maxed-out and | would probably be more expensive than 20k. It would be | interesting to compare the TCO with an equivalent config, and | I wouldn't be surprised to see the server hardware still win. | bogwog wrote: | $60 per unit sounds pretty good. Does anyone have experience | cross compiling to x86 from a cluster of Pis and can say how well | it performs? A cheap and lower-power build farm sounds like an | awesome thing to have in my house. | thejosh wrote: | These would be awesome for build servers, and testing. | | I really like Graviton from AWS, and Apple Silicon is great, I | really hope we move towards ARM64 more. ArchLinux has | https://archlinuxarm.org , I would love to use these to build and | test arm64 packages (without needing to use qemu hackery, awesome | though that it is). | bullen wrote: | This is a lot cheaper, more silent and smaller: | | http://move.rupy.se/file/cluster_client.png | pnathan wrote: | This looks cool! | | I would, however, say that while I'm in the general target | audience, I won't do crowdfunded hardware. If it isn't actually | being produced, I won't buy it. The road between prototype and | production is a long one for hardware. | | (Still waiting for a _very_ cool bit of hardware, 3+ years later | - suspecting that project is just *dead*) | throwaway67743 wrote: | Yes, this, more of this! | bashinator wrote: | There's no backplane - all power and communication goes through a | front-facing ethernet port. Kind of defeats the purpose of a | blade form factor IMO. | alex_suzuki wrote: | Ah, do you feel it too? That need to own some of these, even | though you have zero actual use for them. | petesergeant wrote: | Nothing generates that feeling for me like seeing these things: | | https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1 | | I absolutely can't imagine what I'd use it for, and yet, my | finger has hovered over "buy" many many times over the last few | years | alex_suzuki wrote: | Reminds me of the Psion Series 5 which I owned more than | twenty years ago... and even then, had little use for. :^) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 | petesergeant wrote: | Exactly that. I used to thumb through the back pages of | Personal Computer World[0] under the covers as a kid | looking at the palmtops. I think it's mostly nostalgia | | 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_World | alex_suzuki wrote: | Good times, good times. | LanternLight83 wrote: | Doesn't look too far off from the Pinephone with it's | keyboard | staindk wrote: | I feel that way about the ClockworkPi consoles [1] | | There's a 5% chance that I fall madly in love with this thing | and go tinker on some project in a coffee shop every | weekend... but it's much more likely that I end up almost | never using it :| | | [1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop | fy20 wrote: | I think I could justify the world's most secure and reliable | Home Assistant cluster with automatic failover... | pbronez wrote: | Yeah that's my thought. The main benefit to this is High | Availability. You're not going to get compelling scale-out | performance, but you can protect yourself from local hardware | failures. | | Of course, then you have to ask if you need the density. | There are lots of ways to put Rpi in a rack.. and this | approach gives up Hat compatibility for density. | | For example, I'm considering a rack of Rpi with hifi berry | DACs for a multi-zone audio system. This wouldn't help me | there. | criddell wrote: | Frankly, the bar for that is pretty low... | Hamuko wrote: | I don't feel like I have zero actual use for them. The amount | of Docker containers I have running on my NAS is only ever | going up. These could make for a nice, expandable Kubernetes | cluster. | | As for if that's a good use-case is a whole another thing. | lars-b2018 wrote: | It's not clear to me how to build a business based on RPi | availability. And the clones don't seem to be really in the game. | Are Raspberry Pis becoming more readily available? I don't see | that. | nsteel wrote: | Businesses and consumers don't see the same availability, | apparently. And yes, they are very slowly becoming more | available. But still no Pi 4 about. | goodpoint wrote: | Correct. These are for hobbyists and there is no market. | amelius wrote: | How do we measure the performance of these kinds of systems? | geerlingguy wrote: | Not super fast but efficiency is okay: | https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results | robbiet480 wrote: | The Blade is just a carrier for a Raspberry Pi CM4, so the | performance will be that of a normal CM4. | amelius wrote: | Ok, still it would be nice to have a line that says this | system can do X1 threads of X2 GFLOP/s and has a memory | bandwidth of X3 MB/s, or something like that. | ZiiS wrote: | Unfortunately if you are asking that question the answer | for all the Pi's and clones is "Not enough by more then an | order of magnitude". | geerlingguy wrote: | The clones based on the RK3588 are approaching last-Gen | Qualcomm speeds, so they're not as much of a let down as | the 2016-era chips the Pi is based on. | | And efficiency is much better than the Intel or AMD chips | you could get in a used system around the same price. | znpy wrote: | You can look at benchmarks for the rpi cm4 for that | robbiet480 wrote: | Been waiting for this for over a year, was the first person to | buy a pre-purchase sample. Planning to set up a PXE k3s cluster. | atlgator wrote: | Why only 1 Gbps ethernet? | geerlingguy wrote: | That's the speed of the NIC built into the CM4. If you want 2.5 | or 5 Gbps, you'd have to add a PCIe switch, adding a lot more | cost and complexity--and that would also remove the ability to | boot off NVMe drives :( | | Hopefully the next generation Pi has more PCIe lanes or at | least a faster lane. | forgotuser22 wrote: | A | davgoldin wrote: | This looks very promising. I basically could print an enclosure | to specifically fit my home space. And easily print a new one | when I move. | | More efficient use of space compared to my current silent mini- | home lab -- also about 2U worth of space, but stacked semi- | vertically [1]. | | That's 4 servers each with AMD 5950x, 128GB ECC, 2TB NVMe, 2x8TB | SSD (64c/512GB/72TB total). | | [1] https://ibb.co/Jm1SX7d | LolWolf wrote: | Wait this is pretty sick! What's the full build on that? How do | you even get started on finding good cases that aren't just | massive racks for a home build? | forgotuser22 wrote: | A | wildekek wrote: | I have this cycle every 10 years where my home infra gets to | enterprise level complexity (virtualisation/redundancy/HA) until | the maintenance is more work than the joy it brings. Then, after | some outage that took me way too long to fix, I decide it is over | and I reduce everything down to a single modem/router and WiFi | AP. I feel the pull to buy this and create a glorious heap of | complexity to run my doorbell on and be disapointed, can't wait. | lacrosse_tannin wrote: | These are pi's right? No hardware AES :/ | blitzar wrote: | The blade has arrived but can you get a compute unit to go in it? | The non availability of the whole pi ecosystem has done a lot of | damage. | preisschild wrote: | There are other CM-compatible SoMs. | | Like the Pine64 SOQUARTZ | russelg wrote: | Geerling covers this in the accompanying video for this post. | He couldn't get it running due to no working OS images being | obtainable. | fivesixzero wrote: | I spent some time last week tinkering with a SOQuartz board | and ended up getting it working with a Pine-focused distro | called Plebian[1]. | | Took awhile to land on it though. Before that I tried all | of the other distros on Pine64's "SOQuartz Software | Releases"[2] page without any luck. The only one on that | page that booted was the linked "Armbian Ubuntu Jammy with | kernel 5.19.7" but it failed to boot again after an apt | upgrade. | | So there's at least one working OS, as of last week. But | its definitely quite finicky and would probably need some | work to build a proper device tree for any carrier board | that's not the RPi CM4 Carrier Board. | | [1] https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/quartz64-images | | [2] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz_Software_Releases | fellowmartian wrote: | I don't think these boards are meant for the way people are | trying to use them. Mainline Linux support is actually | great on RK3566 chips, but you have to build your own | images with buildroot or something like that. | blitzar wrote: | So you can get those compute units are obtainable, but a | functioning image remains unobtanium. What a mess. | geerlingguy wrote: | You can usually get an image that functions at least | partially, but it's up to you to determine whether the | amount it functions is enough for your use case. A K3s | setup is usually good to go without some features like | display output. | blitzar wrote: | I like to tinker, but there is a limit. | | The killer feature for their go fund would be is if they | sourced a batch of pi compute modules ... | bombcar wrote: | The Rock5B is whipping the Pi on compute power and | availability. Only use a Pi if you absolutely have to. | blitzar wrote: | At $150+ I would just buy an old small form factor dell / hp | from ebay and have a whole machine. | bogwog wrote: | I bought a retired dual-socket Xeon HP 1U server on ebay | with 128GB of ECC RAM for like $50 on ebay a while back. It | only had one CPU, but upgrading it to two would be very | cheap. | | Sure, it's hulking, obsolete, and very loud beast, but it's | hard to beat the price to performance ratio there... just | make sure you don't put anything super valuable on it | because HP's old proliant firmware likely has a ton of | unpatched critical vulnerabilities (and you'd need an HP | support plan to download patches even if they exist) | celestialcheese wrote: | 100% this. | | I picked up a HP 705 G4 mini on backmarket for $80 shipped | the other day to run Home Assistant and some other small | local containers. 500gb ram, Ryzen 5 2400GE, 8gb ddr4 w/ a | valid windows license. | | Sure it's not as small or silent, but there's no way to | beat the prices of these few-years old enterprise mini-pc's | ChuckMcM wrote: | That is a neat setup. I wish someone would do this but just run | RMII out to an edge connector on the back. Connect them to a | jelly bean switch chip (8 port GbE are like $8 in qty) Signal | integrity on, at most 4" of PCB trace should not be a problem. | You could bring the network "port status" lines to the front if | you're interested in seeing the blinky lights of network traffic. | | The big win here would be that all of the network wiring is | "built in" and compact. Blade replacement it trivial. | | Have your fans blow up from the bottom and stagger "slots" on | each row and if you do 32 slots per row, you probably build a | kilocore cluster in a 6U box. | | Ah the fun I would have with a lab with an nice budget. | themoonisachees wrote: | Couldn't you do 1ki cores /4U with just Epyc CPUs in normal | servers? At that point surely for cheaper, also significantly | easier to build, and faster since the cores don't talk over | Ethernet? | zokier wrote: | > That is a neat setup. I wish someone would do this but just | run RMII out to an edge connector on the back | | That stuck out to me too, they are making custom boards and | custom chassis, surely it would be cleaner to route the | networking and power through backplane instead of having | gazillion tiny patch cables and random switch just hanging in | there. Could also avoid the need for PoE by just having power | buses in the backplane. | | Overall imho the point of blades is that some stuff gets | offloaded to the chassis, but here the chassis doesn't seem to | be doing much at all. | nine_k wrote: | What kind of fun might that be? | ChuckMcM wrote: | Well for one, I'd build a system architecture I first | imagined back at Sun in the early 90's which is a NUMA fabric | attached compute/storage/io/memory scalable compute node. | | Then I'd take a shared nothing cluster (typical network | attached Linux cluster) and refactor a couple of algorithms | that can "only" run on super computers and have them run | faster on a complex that costs 1/10th as much. That would be | based on an idea that was generated by listening to IBM and | Google talk about their quantum computers and explaining how | they were going to be so great. Imagine replacing every | branch in a program with an assert that aborts the program on | fail. You send 10,000 copies of the program to 10,000 cores | with the asserts set uniquely on each copy. The core that | completes kicks off the next round. | sroussey wrote: | Apple should go with a blade design for the Mac Pro. Just stick | in as many M2 Ultra blades as you need to up the compute and | memory. | | Will need to deal with NUMA issues on the software side. | geerlingguy wrote: | I would be all over any server like form factor for M-series | chips. The efficiency numbers for the CPU are great. | eismcc wrote: | It's amazing to see how far these systems have come since my | coverage from The Verge in 2014, where I built a multi-node | Parallella cluster. The main problem I had then was that there | was no of the shelf GPU friendly library to run on it, so I ended | up working with the Gray Chapel project to get some distributed | vectorization support. Of course, that's all changed now. | | https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/4/5779468/twitter-engineer-b... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-24 23:00 UTC)