[HH] Raspberry Pi clusters

[Mark Komarinski]

On 3/2/2014 5:29 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Ignoring the issue of whether this is worth doing (as Kurt pointed out,
> the performance of a Pi makes this somewhat pointless, though might make
> sense if your objective is to test clustering functionality rather than
> performance), I've yet to see a Pi cluster with a mechanical design that
> allows you to easily extract/replace an individual Pi.
>
Depending on what he was doing, he probably could have spun up a cluster 
on AWS for even less money.

I'll give props, though, he certainly thought through a lot of the 
issues around cluster computing except for the queueing, which is 
probably why it only supports one user.

And as for replacing hardware, I've been told that the big cloud vendors 
get in a shipping container full of equipment.  After power and network 
is hooked up, the doors are locked and the entire container gets treated 
like a single unit.  The container gets replaced after some percentage 
of the nodes inside fail and are unrecoverable.  It's probably cheaper 
than having people on staff to run in and replace hard drives on a 
one-by-one basis.

-Mark