Andy Burns  wrote:
> A. Dumas wrote:
>
> > Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> >
> >> You could pack a pretty large cluster of them in a mini-ITX case with a
> >> little ingenuity and a good fan.
> >
> > In fact that is precisely what TuringPi does (aims to do). For now their
> > ingenuity stops at 4, though: https://turingpi.com and
> > https://turingpi.com/turing-pi-2-announcement/
>
> Is that just intended as a "fun" project?
>
> If so, then fine, have fun; but if not, I can't see a four x CM4 cluster
> being faster or cheaper than a workaday PC, even Oracle's one thousand x
> Pi3 cluster seems kinda pointless ...

In many such clusters, having multiple nodes is the whole point.  They're
good for prototyping platformss like Kubernetes, which in production might
have dozens or hundreds of servers in a datacentre.  A Pi cluster makes that
cheap enough to have that a whole cloud on your desk.  You can then test the
cloud features, like load balancing and resiliency (pull the plug on a Pi
and check it fails over correctly).  When you're done, deploy your app to
the production datacentre (at the cost of $100 per hour or whatever).

Another use case is where you might end up running a pile of VMs on a PC -
it can end up more efficient to run one task per Pi instead.

Theo

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