Hi Everybody,
I am looking to build a 10 Node Cluster withthis board to run Cassandra for development and education.
Does anybody know of any off the shelf cases kits that can be bought?
So far I have seen the PicoCluster which is expensive and they sell each RockPro64 for $100.
This brings the Total cost to $1400.
At that price I can but myslef a 32Thread 1st Gen Threadripper and run docker.
so for $790 I can buy 10 RockPro64 units and have $700 left to build a cluster case, power, cooling, heatsinks and network switch.
Its seems reasonable.
iif you are gonna build yourself maybe start with a cluster of 3 to determine if it actually works well enough to do what you want. it would be a shame to buy 10 and set up only to discover it does not work as expected.
Thanks for the reply .... i am a bit reckless so I have gone ahead and bought the picocluster 10H case.
As my use case is Cassandra which is a heavily write focused application I am now looking into the best storage solution.
I have ordered 64GB eMMC storage and one NVMe PCIe riser card to test my options.
Thx
Axel
Question:
For what ? and why ?
No realy, for what sombody need a Cluster of 10 / 24 / 48 ROCKPro64 ?
01-19-2019, 02:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2019, 02:50 PM by suberimakuri.)
I purchased 3x rock64 for a k8s cluster and then an additional 3x rock64 to run HA masters.
What has been a hassle is mainline kernel support and a lack of expertise on my part to get recent kernels working on Ubuntu with an Ubuntu-ish module list.
This is required to make use of newer networking features available in kernel ~4.8+ (Rock64 on 4.4).
Arch Linux runs fine however and has all the modules but packages and Ansible (software tool) use by communities is less than Ubuntu/etc.
I would suggest that before you purchase a stack of SBC's check that they are supported in mainline and/or your choice of OS has mainline kernel packages. If you plan to have the cluster for some time this could affect you too.
One of the SBC's seems unreliable and would crash randomly in cluster or blank OS. I'm trying to RMA it now but of course it's decided to start behaving... This could happen with any hardware though so this is only a factor if deciding between hardware vs vm's.
If i was going to do something like this i would the RockPro64 as well because i see the real development in the future going there as so far tho it might be behind in some manners to the older board once the mainline support is public i think it will be the best choice. so far in my own development i only see the gpu stack as the only real issue with the mainline kernel support as most of the other issues i don't think are that big.
regarding clustering them , if your ok with building and hacking things i would find some surplus shop and look for a old 19" rack frame with slot rails in it as that way you can just slide the boards in on their edige.... currently i use one in my network rack which is close to my bench and rework stations and its got a bunch of boards slid into it just to keep things off my bench. i built a crappy backplane board that i use to plug the boards into that carries the signals to a custom switcher i built years ago. the whole thing was really just done to clean up and get crap off my bench because i am constantly working on a variety of software and need the boards close by to test stuff. I think i paid like 25bux for the 19" cage years ago from a surplus shop locally.
be creative... and have fun and who says ya need to pay the big bux if you can hack something together yourself.
Apologies Guys .... I don't seem to get notifications of replies to my posts!
In the end I purchased as 10 x RockPro64 Cluster case from Pico Cluster;
Had to work with the Pico guys to replace the PSU to a 12v version and a Buck converter for the switches and the fans.
:-)
Any-who, I read this really cool tutorial on how to build a cluster of RaspberryPi's recently & I thought it might be helpful to anyone interested.
