Meet the new SBC Linux Cluster King!

Turing Pi's shaking things up with their new RK1. It's 5x faster than the Pi CM4.

But is it worth the price? Dive into my test results, then we'll rack up two SBC clusters: 6 Pi CM4s on the DeskPi Super6c cluster board, and 4 Turing Pi RK1s in the Turing Pi 2.

Some things I mentioned in the video (some links are affiliate links):

Contents:

00:00 - The new king
00:57 - CM4 vs RK1
02:11 - A crippling feature
04:22 - RK1's RK3588 performance
05:57 - Mini 10" Rackmount
07:11 - Rackmount build
15:24 - Mini Rack build
19:32 - First boot in the rack
20:49 - Configuring networking with Ansible
24:00 - Kubernetes install
26:34 - Kubernetes overview and debugging
28:26 - It works!
29:31 - And it's faster!
30:02 - Working on a new site

[ave]

Jeff, Thank you for your honesty in who sent you what and how things were paid for. That’s very refreshing in this space and shows you value your audience

[justinsheppherd]

"All's well that ends in "Not A Fire"" - a motto to live by.

[slothjr]

My wallet wishes I had never discovered your channel ... keep up the great coverage of your SBC adventures, you play in the same space I'm interested in.

[grizz_sh]

The RK1 boards are crazy fast! I have two of these TuringPi 2 boards, running 2 RK1s and 2 CM4s each. A sort of P-module, E-module configuration. 92GB of RAM and 82 GHz of CPU. I use Hashicorp Nomad to orchestrate tasks using a combination of the Docker and Exec drivers. Ceph to manage the persistent volumes. Soon I'll be able to retire my power-hungry my Dell R710s in favor of a system that draws < 200W. Couldn't be happier with the results!

[djneonl]

“I don’t need a cluster”
“What would I use it for”
“It’s just gonna be running some bullshit”


I so really want one

[TechnoTim]

As soon as you said pod was pending and you were using nfs I said to my self "nfs-common". Great video!

[ratage]

Thank you for showing the debugging steps with the cluster, including how to see which pod had stalled and finding error logs using "describe". You can watch 100 happy path tutorials without ever seeing these things.

[wskinnyodden]

That rockship kicks butt, I can tell, I have a NanoPC-T6 powered by that baby, it ROCKS!

[GrahamToal]

I've done a fair bit of cluster computing, on big clusters like Stampede at the University of Texas, so I'm familiar with the desire of cluster creators to have fast shared filespace and high speed interconnect fabrics etc - *but* - at least for all the real projects (as opposed to demos or benchmarks) that I've used clusters for in real life, I've always been able to structure my code so that high speed interconnects and fast shared filespace are just are not needed. Even for applications where there was big data rather than just a lot of CPU being used. My observation is that these extreme hardware facilities are mostly used by people who don't make the effort to optimise their application for parallelism and who try to shoehorn code that was really designed with uniprocessing in mind, into a multiprocessing environment without taking on the necessary restructuring. Now I'm retired, when I need to throw CPU at a problem I just farm it out to a few dozen regular Pi's and a couple of spare x86 portables I have around the house, running over Wifi, with one regular NFS mount to supply shared files across the lightweight cluster. In fact - although I do have proper cluster MPI software installed, I generally can get by with just kicking off tasks using "ssh". So I mention all this to suggest that perhaps the features you describe and the cost of the system you're using is perhaps a little overkill, that could be avoided by a little more coding effort. An interesting approach for a subsequent video might be in terms of computation done per dollar rather than just what is the fastest shinyest new hardware available?

[BeepDog]

I have one of these, and it is spectacular! I couldn't afford to get 4x of the 32gb nodes, but I have two of em. They are heckin nice.

[demirk.]

Man i really hope that Raspberry Pi prices comes down to a reasonable level, so that us enthusiast can do stuff like these

[conallogribin]

I've been using the turingpi 2 with 3x RK1's for a few weeks, and really enjoying it.
Ive been managing it using the Ansible for DevOps and Ansible for Kubernetes books you put out, so many thanks for that!

[chrisl]

Break out the soldering iron and swap the direction those power leads exit the PSU board. No more fan-blade jeopardy, no more stressing of the board connector.

[xbelthesarx]

Really seems like the Turing Pi board could benefit from having a switch chip. Even if you still only had 1 Gb or 2.5 Gb connectivity to the external network, having a 40/80Gb switching fabric between nodes would make something like Ceph internal replication or any node to node comms in the cluster much better. Of course, having a 10 Gb SFP+ would also be ideal, since so much 10 Gb fiber gear is plummeting in price these days, and might obsolete the need for finding another big chip and traces on the board, so that might the smarter play.

[nickpoorman]

Love these tiny videos. As someone who does Van Life traveling full time in my van, I’m always looking for ways to run NAS and cluster solutions in a compact “portable” way. Especially love it when you can run on 12v, 24v, or 48v DC.

[TT-itgg]

Excellent! Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the new base board with 10GbE.

[rmcdudmk]

These cluster boards keep getting cooler and cooler. Not sure what i would do with one but it would be cool to play with.

[paulalmquist]

I remember when data rates went from 110 baud to 300 baud. That speed increase was amazing for the time. And years later the first 14, 400 baud modem came to market at $14, 400 each. These young folks think 1Gbps is slow. They do not know what slow is. It did teach us patience.

[SalvatorePellitteri]

this stuff does not make sense when for this price you can buy 3-5 mini pc with 8 core ryzen cpus. you don't have to deal with arm specific software and the performance are 10 times faster.

[rollerboogie]

This thing is sooo cool. I stopped running a homelab or server for my house because of power consumption. This setup is making me rethink that. I could do crazy stuff with one of these boards.