ITX-sized 7-node ARM-64 cluster
forum.pine64.org
forum.pine64.org
I bought one without looking too closely into it after seeing it mentioned somewhere online by someone who said it was cheap and it was ARM64. Only after it'd arrived did I learn that it had very poor Linux support. I've got mine laying around without ever having bothered to even boot it due to this.
For example, here's a key quote from what Hackaday had to say about the Linux support of the Pine64:
> The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine64 and I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine64 wiki. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine64 to be a waste of $15.
https://hackaday.com/2016/04/21/pine64-the-un-review/
Has Linux support improved recently? Anyone here doing anything useful with a Pine64?
As far as China single-board computers go, I'm pretty pleased with Pine's build quality and attention to detail with regards to electrical design that's reflected in their schematics. Community-provided Linux support has come a long way in the last year+, it's worth checking out.
[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort [2] https://www.armbian.com/pine64
As a side-note, armbian's mainline is perfectly usable for headless applications.
See A64 there. Not quite there yet, but closer than a year ago.
Certainly not proud of the purchase... software support is still this bad despite two years already.
A Sopine A64 compute module costs $29 and performs 15.05 OpenSSL signs / second [0].
An AMD Ryzen 1700 costs ~$300 and performs 986.73 OpenSSL signs / second [1].
So, if you spent $300 on 10 Pine64's, you would achieve approximately 150 signs / second, but for the same cost you could just buy the AMD chip and achieve approximately 6.5x better performance for the dollar.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pine-64-...
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-ryze...
The ARM they tested at Cloudflare is also of course nothing like the mobile chip that powers the pine.
I don't think the focus here would be performance, but the cluster operations. Also, having slow hardware helps with spotting some performance issues (there are things we get away with Xeons that we simply can't with ARMs) even though fast hardware will help uncover some concurrency bugs that wouldn't happen on ARM.
As for virtualizing a cluster inside a bigger Xeon box, I worked with server provisioning software and the kind of nasty bugs you find with real hardware is pretty surprising. Some nodes refuse to shut down, some refuse to start, some take longer than expected (please see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~maas-committers/maas/trunk/revi... for the smallest commit ever - a single bit flip - that actually solves a bug) and so on.
I'll probably put mine inside an empty HP workstation pizza box I have with a proper power supply, along with a couple Pi's, a PiHAT cluster, a CHIO and an early Pine A64. Having a heterogeneous cluster is a necessity for testing.
That now it's possible to have a computer whose sole processor is a Xeon Phi fills my heard with a tiny little bit of hope.
That doesn't negate a desire for a unique architecture portable.
edit: Particularly of interest to me is being able to isolate nodes. Your router and console are on the same physical board perhaps, but only interconnect via an onboard Ethernet switch (itself managed as a 'slave' under either the router or console node, depending on where one landed philosophically). Compute nodes could be powered off entirely when not in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus
Makes a guy somewhat nostalgic of when computers were a collection of boards rather than a single chip.
The more common converters "burn" the voltage difference times ampere. So 14W will be emitted as heat by the converter, a matching heatsink would be somewhat important.
Instead of 24W wasted it is now 14W wasted. I am not sure if this is worth the effort.