New Beowulf Cluster Time

Time for a little Friday Fun and to put the Labs into the HMx.

We’re working on a few interesting things at the moment that need a small test cluster to get the basics working. At least until we start experimenting at larger scale. 

Of course, we could do this on the cloud and that would probably make sense but firstly, where’s the fun in that? Secondly the advantages evaporate pretty quickly the first time you get to your desk on a Monday morning and see the bill your VMs generated over the weekend because you forget to tear them down on Friday evening 😢. Ask me how I know!

We have the luxury of having a small rack, redundant high-speed connectivity and a SDN so might as well make use of it. Besides I like playing with hardware.

I wanted to do this all on Raspberry Pi 5s but some of the things we need to run STILL don’t have ARM support… Get it together people! Your stuff needs to run on ARM too now.

The pricing on Pi 5s was a bit problematic too. I don’t need scale at this point, but a 4 core 16GB Pi with an NVME HAT, SSD and some kind of power supply and cases for a bench based cluster ends up being close to £200 a node 😮

That seemed a bit mad so I went exploring and found some AMD 8 core mini PCs with 16GB RAM for about the same price. That’ll do. Assuming they don’t blow on me the first time I power them up.

I will probably buy some Pi 5s too anyway because, well, it’s not 1990 anymore and even a test cluster needs to be heterogenous right? 😁

Next up, time for some fun with a new HPC data plane idea ooh and Flux Framework.

There goes the weekend!