Question Make a cluster computer, or what would you do?

[aaroncmichael]

Hello. I recently bought 10 Mac minis from an education liquidation sale. They are the 2014 models and they run opensuse like a brand new computer. I actually bought them to sell…. But then I started thinking about what else I could do with them. Any suggestions appreciated.

What I am specifically wondering is, is there any benefit to creating a cluster computer for the home user? Or is that only beneficial for specific applications? Will opensuse work for clustering them?

If I can do something with them, I’d keep them. But also that could be a neat way to sell them, as well.
Thank you in advance for any thoughts you might have!

 

[kanewolf]

Hello. I recently bought 10 Mac minis from an education liquidation sale. They are the 2014 models and they run opensuse like a brand new computer. I actually bought them to sell…. But then I started thinking about what else I could do with them. Any suggestions appreciated.

What I am specifically wondering is, is there any benefit to creating a cluster computer for the home user? Or is that only beneficial for specific applications? Will opensuse work for clustering them?

If I can do something with them, I’d keep them. But also that could be a neat way to sell them, as well.
Thank you in advance for any thoughts you might have!

Very few applications are cluster aware, meaning they will use multiple nodes, an example would be BOINC. With the advances in cloud computing, more applications are available to schedule work to individual nodes, and example would be Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.
Can you do it? Yes. Will it be useful beyond a science project? Probably not.

 

[USAFRet]

A "cluster" as I think you mean requires specific software, to do a specific purpose.

There isn't any, to my knowledge, consumer level software where you can merge actual hardware resources. CPU/RAM/GPU.

 

[Eximo]

Regardless of figuring out something for these machines to work on, 2014 macs aren't going to have that much performance compared to the same value in a used, but still newer, high end workstation or server. No clustering required.

 

[aaroncmichael]

That’s unfortunate, as this is a really great opportunity to do something cool and educational. But if there is no practical benefit, I guess I’ll skip it. They seem like overkill to use them as a router, and I don’t need a web or file server. I’m also looking at turning them into tv streamers maybe.

 

[Eximo]

If you just want to do it for the sake of doing it, nothing wrong with that. Might be a good way to do a long term thermal stability test on all of them at once. Blender cluster comes to mind.