[ballen]

Another neat use-case for this hardware is scale testing of systems management tooling, eg. provisioning, configuration management. HPC centers are looking at the possibility of having to manage 100k+ nodes in a single cluster.

Additional links:

http://cluster.bitscope.com

http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2017/Novem...

My favorite form factor to go build a Pi-like Cluster is something like this: http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p....

- Gigabit Ethernet MAC on-board, Pine64's SOPINE and Raspberry Pi Compute Module both require per node networking components to be on the carrier board.

- Basic headers used for connecting to a carrier board

- Carrier board "only" needs an embedded switch and 5v power. However, I've not yet come across an embedded switch yet that has a non-blocking ratio of 1GbE ports to 10/25GbE uplinks.

- Carrier board should probably be mini-ITX or other standard form factor to fit in existing chassis. Form factor and embedded switch options are going to limit the number of nodes per carrier board.

[anfractuosity]

I'm just looking at the friendly arm website at some of the other NanoPi's, which I'd not heard of before, I'm quite tempted by the Gbps ethernet. How do you find the software/OS support, are they pretty reliable, with longish uptimes?

[pero]

i have some nanopi neo(1)s and they're rock solid - my rule of thumb with arm boards is that support is good enough if it has an armbian _debian_ (vs just armbian ubuntu) release

[anfractuosity]

Cheers I might look at getting one then, as I had problems with my Pi's network connectivity being slow compared to a laptop's using the same ethernet over power line adapter.

[pero]

no idea about PoE on either board but if i/o is a concern you might want to take a look at the $25 rock64 with gbe and usb3 - i/o on my neo1 maxes out somewhere just below 20mb/s but my rock64 has no problem doing 80mb/s with some ancient spinny disks and some armbian devs have done ~200mb/s with ssds iirc

os support on the rock64 is not quite there yet however but given the features@pricepoint i expect it to catch up

[squarefoot]

I've used some of their NanoPI M1 and other similar boards by other vendors (Orange PI PC and Zero) with great success, although not in any cluster configuration (mainly SDR and other "normal" stuff). The power/price ratio is generally more favorable compared to the RasPI boards, and there is some good information on the Armbian forums on how to get fine CPU throttling, which would probably be of interest in such a scenario.