alt Hacker NewsSo obviously it depends on goals; I absolutely agree that up to a surprisingly high point, the best way to actually get the most compute is to go buy the most powerful single machine that will do what you want off eBay or whatever. My goal is the opposite; I want to specifically get my hands dirty figuring out how to actually provision and manage and operate a large number of hosts, even if they're so low resource as to be effectively worthless individually and are still weak clustered. To that end specifically, digikey claims to be willing to sell me a rather large number of pi zero 2w at $15/each - https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC11... - and even cheap used boxes on eBay seem to start at double that. Obviously you need a little bit more to actually run them, but I believe the only thing you actually need is a USB cable and then a single host computer can provide power and boot them over usb.
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I feel you, but something like an R730 or 7810 with a pair of E5-2690 v4 and 128GB RAM can be had for under $400. Not the most power efficient, but you'd have to run it quite a while to make up the difference in energy cost. Plus there's way less work in getting it all set up.
Just be aware that you’ll be stuck with wifi, or spending far more on ethernet adapters for them. If you want cheap with ethernet there’s other devices supported by Arabian in the same price range which have ethernet. It’s fun for sure to have a huge number of very cheap machines, I have an old arm cluster made of Odroid boards for that purpose.