I have a handful of Raspberry Pis laying around, enough that a "Raspberry Pi compute cluster" would be useful for me.

I currently have a Raspberry Pi 5 running a few services that's starting to get over-full. I like the idea of having ten raspbrerry pi's with resources that I administer as just one machine.

I also have enough Raspberry Pis that it makes sense to run them for parallelizable workloads (like Blender renders or Hashcat cracking).

But I honestly have no idea what "using a Raspberry Pi compute cluster" looks like. I figure it involves using netboot to automagically configure nodes you add, a biiiig ugly bundle of power and ethernet cables, and finally learning Kubernetes.

I'd like to emphasize that I already own these Pis, I'm not buying them new. Otherwise, I think it'd be better in every regard to get something like a used Mac Mini and put Linux on it.

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emma wrote on December 19, 2024 at 9:42 PM

i have not. all my raspberry pi projects start with 'i'll definitely finish the project i've set out to do this time', and end with 'ah, oh well'.

flabberghaster wrote on December 19, 2024 at 4:42 PM

Why would you need to netboot them? I think it's likely depending on the size of your cluster you could just script up an install process and only just install kubernetes on them

twovests OP wrote on December 19, 2024 at 5:18 PM

i assume netboot is magic and that's beautiful

flabberghaster wrote on December 19, 2024 at 7:51 PM

Netboot is kind of a pain in the neck IME. But I have very limited experience with it

twovests OP wrote on December 19, 2024 at 4:08 PM

Also consider this an open offer for me to give you my Raspberry Pis for free. I think they would be better suited in your hands than in mine!