Homelab

371 readers

3 users here now

Rules

Be Civil.
Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
No memes or potato images.
We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
Please no shitposting or blogspam.
No Referral Linking.
Keep piracy discussion off of this community

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

communick@selfhosted.forum

rglullis

Is an ARM cluster a good idea? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by bobdvb@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have the possibility of getting my hands on a practically unlimited supply of S905X2 Android boxes, they have 2GB of RAM and 8GB eMMC, only 100Mbit LAN but USB-3 as well.

I was joking around with colleagues, what about making an ARM cluster out of them? Use the 100Mbps port as a management port and add a USB3 Gigabit or 2.5G adapter for general traffic. Power the cluster by PoE using PoE to 5v splitters from a smart, management switch with PoE (10W each box?).

Lets say I got 40 boxes with 4 cores, that's 160 cores and 80GB of RAM. It could run Armbian with Kubernetes or something lighter. I personally have no use for it, but it could be a fun proof of concept?

Tell me why I shouldn't do this! Tell me why it won't work and why I'd be wasting my time.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SilentDecode@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago

but it could be a fun proof of concept?

Having gigantic clusters of small ARM computers, has been around almost as long as ARM is on consumer hardware. Definitly since the very first Pi 1. Loads of people have constructed many different configurations with all kind of different hardware. Loads of people here even run K8s and other stuff on their ARM cluster.

Tell me why I shouldn't do this!

If you have no use for it, why bother? Only if you want to learn from it, it can be useful. But still, you really have to think about what you want to do with it.

Oh, and power reasons. If you're in the USA, and your power is cheap, then why not. If you're not so lucky with the powerbill, then just get one big system (x64 or ARM) and just run stuff on there.