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468 points speckx | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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Aurornis ◴[] No.45302320[source]
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 with or learn on a cluster of Linux machines, the cost effective way to do it is to buy a desktop consumer CPU, install a hypervisor, and create a lot of VMs. It’s not as satisfying as plugging cables into different Raspberry Pi units and connecting them all together if that’s your thing, but once you’re in the terminal the desktop CPU, RAM, and flexibility of the system will be appreciated.

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1. llm_nerd ◴[] No.45302676[source]
If you assume that the author did this to have content for his blog and his YouTube channel, it makes much more sense. Going back to the well with a "I regret" entry allows for extra exploiting of a pretty dubious venture.

YouTube is absolute jam packed full of people pitching home "lab" sort of AI buildouts that are just catastrophically ill-advised, but it yields content that seems to be a big draw. For instance Alex Ziskind's content. I worry that people are actually dumping thousands to have poor performing ultra-quantized local AIs that will have zero comparative value.

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2. philipwhiuk ◴[] No.45302697[source]
I doubt anyone does this seriously.
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3. nerdsniper ◴[] No.45302735[source]
I sure hope no one does this seriously expecting to save some money. I enjoy the videos on "catastrophically ill-advised" build-outs. My primary curiosities that get satisfied by them are:

1) How much worse / more expensive are they than a conventional solution?

2) What kinds of weird esoteric issues pop up and how do they get solved (e.g. the resizable BAR issue for GPU's attached to RPi's PCIe slot)