Just got my new cluster hat, who wants to help me get up to speed?

[Jason Henry]

Well, things started when I was cleaning out a desk drawer and found a forgotten stash of Pi Zeros. (two 1.2, two 1.3) and thought 'only way these will ever see use is if I cluster them', ...so, hat ordered.

Wasn't until I was at work the next day when the day slowed down enough that I could think about other things when it finally occured to me that the Zeros were still single-core and a pi3 (only spares I have free right now are 3Bs) with four of Zeros would still be outclassed by just a pi5 on its own, maybe even a pi4 depending on the application... So what do I do?

...that's right- jump the shark on the point of this (putting some otherwise unused parts to work) and decide I'll start acquiring some Zero2's. I have a local MicroCenter, they have some in-stock, it's not a time critical project, etc... ...they had four when I first checked, I already had one spare so just needed 3 more. MicroCenter still has a one/per restriction and I'm still a bit surprised I was only able to get one of those four before they all sold. So, two to go.

So, ...while I'm waiting for them to restock, I have other things to figure out...

1) pi3, pi4 or pi5? ...I have a couple projects that could stand a hardware refresh, so I could free up a 3B+ pretty easily unless there's significant reason to go with a pi4 (ie: power overhead). That said- 8g pi5 is, like, $5 more than an 8g pi4, so I guess my real question there is if a 3B+ would be better than a 3B, or if a pi4 would be better then any reason a pi4 would be preferred over a pi5. (ie: cooling). My thoughts being that a pi3 would likely be fine with ambient cooling, pi4 might be fine with ambient cooling so long as there's airflow in the area, pi5 will absolutely need active cooling.

2) power supply... Which I guess would be dependent on the resolution of 1), unless separate pi and hat power is something I should reconsider (if I could, I'd just add a PoE hat and take advantage of my preference and existing infrastructure, but I expect that's not a real option here?)

3) TBD

...

...

12) what the hell am I going to use this thing for?

Thanks in advance and looking forward to other people's thoughts,

-jason

[Ian Goldsmith]

Might be old but 

https://medium.com/@dhuck/the-missing-clusterhat-tutorial-45ad2241d738

isn’t a bad start. Not sure whats changed in the years since.

Some versions of kuberneetes should be possible for learning - k3s iirc.  The horsepower will never be the point - there isnt any. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ClusterHAT" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clusterhat+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/clusterhat/f7573cc5-9c05-48d3-941b-4224fe3e37efn%40googlegroups.com.

[Jason Henry]

Yep, looks like that will be a fine starting point. or at least something to focus on until I get settled in ;)

I was actually thinking something along the lines of a Docker Swarm might be what I poke at first... I have half a dozen or so Pis that are generally always on but seldomly used (ie: OSMC, a pi-based NAS, octopi, etc) and my thought was to maybe reclaim some of that idle processing ability for other low-demand services- I've thought about piHole, maybe a local git with a network browser UI (if such a thing exists). I think my idea currently is to use the cluster as a central hub with the host pi orchestrating the whole thing. Attached Zeros as primary nodes then if things go well I'll look at adding those other devices as secondary nodes or translating those devices into containers to be managed by the swarm as a whole.

Or at least that's as much of a rough plan as I have currently.