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dukeyukey 3 days ago

It's good for the soul to have your cluster running in your home somewhere.

NordSteve 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Bad for your power bill though.

platybubsy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm sure 5 rpis will devastate the power grid

duxup 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I need to heat my house too so maybe it helps a little there.

11101010001100 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You still pay for power for the cloud.

trenchpilgrim 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still less than renting the same amount of compute. Somewhere between several months and a couple years you pull ahead on costs. Unless you only run your lab a few hours a day.

Damogran6 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I got past that back when I was paying for ISDN and had 5 Surplus Desktop PCs...write it off as 'Professional development'

throwaway894345 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What does a few rpis cost on a monthly basis?

theodric 3 days ago | parent [-]

Depends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo.

Handy: https://700c.dk/?powercalc

My Pi CM4 NAS with a PCIe switch, SATA and USB3 controllers, 6 SATA SSDs, 2 VMs, 2 LXC containers, and a Nextcloud snap pretty much sits at 17 watts most of the time, hitting 20 when a lot is being asked of it, and 26-27W at absolute max with all I/O and CPU cores pegged. €3.85/mo if I pay ESB, but I like to think that it runs fully off the solar and batteries :)

throwaway894345 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Depends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo.

Pretty sure most of us aren't running anywhere close to full load 24/7, but whoa, Irish power is expensive. In the central US I pay $0.14/KWh.

theodric 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, it's brutal. Was €0.39 right after Mad Vlad kicked off his vanity conflict.

throwaway894345 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s rough. What’s your progress on renewables? Wind has made electricity really cheap in my state and I would think Ireland would be pretty windy (esp offshore)?

fragmede 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

cries in west coast peak $0.71/KWh rate

ofrzeta 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe so, but even then a second-hand blade server is more cost-effective than a Raspi Cluster.

geerlingguy 3 days ago | parent [-]

Not if you run it idle a lot; most commercial blade servers suck down a lot of power. I think a niche where Pi blades can work is for a learning cluster, like in schools for HPC learning, network automation, etc.

It's definitely not suited for production, but there, you won't find old blade servers either (for the power to performance issue).