I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago. In that time Raspberry Pi upgraded the CM4 to a CM5, so I ordered a set of 10 16GB CM5 Lite modules for my blade cluster. That should give me 160 GB of total RAM to play with.
This was the biggest Pi cluster I've built, and it set me back around $3,000, shipping included:
There's another Pi-powered blade computer, the Xerxes Pi. It's smaller and cheaper, but it just wrapped up its own Kickstarter. Will it ship in less than two years? Who knows, but I'm a sucker for crowdfunded blade computers, so of course I backed it!
But my main question, after sinking in a substantial amount of money: are Pi clusters even worth it anymore? I There's no way this cluster could beat the $8,000, 4-node Framework Desktop cluster in performance. But what about in price per gigaflop, or in efficiency or compute density?
There's only one way to find out.
Compute Blade Cluster Build
I made a video going over everything in this blog post—and the entire cluster build (and rebuild, and rebuild again) process. You can watch it here, or on YouTube:
But if you're on the blog, you're probably not the type to sit through a video anyway. So moving on...
Clustering means doing everything over n times
In the course of going from 'everything's in the box' to 'running AI and HPC benchmarks reliably', I rebuilt the cluster basically three times:
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