I wonder how this compares to a Microwulf cluster [0] in terms of cost / gigaflop. I'm guessing it isn't very efficient.
For comparison, you could buy a motherboard, 32 GB of RAM, and an Intel i5 processor for $500 that will do over 20 GFLOPS.
So, it doesn't really stack up well from a price/performance standpoint. The value of these systems is more teaching students how to work with parallel code.
There are no practical applications to this, it's just to show that it can be done.
You can spawn 64 processes in a Core I7 and it would be about the same, just faster. Or 64 VMs.
Maybe the real value of these systems is to teach students to design and calculate before building it.
The application of this is a teaching model. It's a lot easier to demonstrate parallelism gains on this type of platform. Scaling beyond a single ARM core is going to give you immediate performance benefits. Scaling further out to the entire cluster will continue to show returns.
With a single desktop, once you go beyond ~4 cores the gains will drop off too quickly. You just won't be able to see gains out to 64 threads on a single CPU, where on this you should.
It also doesn't hurt to have a quirky architecture to get students excited by. And yes, you could also spend some time discussing the architectural trade-offs and why this is not a cost-effective system for production use.
I made a bad assumption because your account is almost one year old. I'm sorry. Now I see that information is not given anywhere in this site. I think this vote method was taken from Reddit.