alt Hacker NewsSomething I've been playing with: what's the cheapest semi-reasonable computer that I could make a toy cluster from? Currently eyeing buying a bunch of Raspberry Pi Zeros but I suspect there are cheaper options (maybe some tiny openwrt thing). Too bad ESP32s don't have an MMU:D
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You can get intel NUCs way cheaper if you look around, or the Lenovo mini PCs. Small clusters will never beat a decent CPU but you can probably make a cluster of old mini PCs for less than the price of one.
I have a bunch of old Rpi 3B's in a 19" 1RU rack space i use for toy clustering. PoE splitters from a PoE switch to power them which also provides the network uplink. All very neat and self contained and when it comes times to upgrade/replace if they all fail (i have a couple of spares) I can just pull out the 1RU for disposal.
Intel NUC's are probably much better value for money these days but the 3B's were pretty cheap at the time I bought them.
Really depends on the details of your goals, but why not just VMs?
The "problem" with Pi-like devices is that they're usually not very "normal". The process of provisioning is different, IIRC they only "recently" supported booting off something other than the SD Card, and in the case of the Zeros, you'll either be using Wifi or an external USB Ethernet dongle (over USB OTG no less). Sometimes they need specially compiled version of linux, so you're stuck far from mainline (this was a big component of the RPis success) This may be distracting from your goals of learning about clustering.
I suspect the $10 Pi Zero is about as cheap as you'll get though, depending on your personal costs of case + ethernet dongle + USB power supply, etc.