03-23-2016, 01:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-23-2016, 01:27 AM by Epsilon.
Edit Reason: Making clearer
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(01-16-2016, 08:35 AM)Ron Piggott Wrote: I really would really like a 'Cluster' area.
As I said already my interest in the 'Pine 64' is a render farm. I watched a video on YouTube of a Render Farm setup in 2010 with 24 nodes. Each node ran "Ubuntu". They stated their monthly electricity bill was in excess of $1,000. I am confident that the speed and memory of the $29 version of the 'Pine 64' is comparable to this. But the electricity consumption would be much less.
I have some experience with building clusters of consumer hardware, mostly laptops with an i5 and 8gb of ram. 40 of these cannot compete with a single 770 as far as rendering video is concerned In my experience the only place where clusters of inexpensive hardware beat a PC with a mid range or last gen graphics card is one where you need tons of ip addresses. Having a cluster is cool for experimentation and developing software to be put onto a larger supercomputer. Its also great for street cred, but in reality a cluster of SBCs is not worth it, spend your money on a graphics card and learn how to program CUDA, it's far easier to manage and you have a computer than can run more or less any software to boot.
If you want to see what a cluster of SBCs should be used for look at the use cases for pico cluster.