No, I saw that, I just don’t understand it. I can do all of that with a PC. Is this a PC? A more powerful Raspberry Pi? What does the ability to “learn concepts” even mean? I learn concepts from books, what does the hardware do?
This board is a very convenient way (maybe the most convenient one I've seen) to setup a bare-metal cluster of computers. Not just multiple cores, not just multiple VMs, four entirely separate ARM computers communicating over a real hardware network. One Alternative to boards like this is to connect multiple SBCs together, with all the wiring, and also some mechanical support. Another (more powerful alternative) is to install some kind of server rack at home. More expensive, too. Using multiple virtual machines is also not quite the same.
What people use it for? Mostly to learn how to deal with problems that arise from managing a cluster and running software on it. Can you build a website that tolerates getting one of the nodes or hard drives turned off?
Some people use such solutions for productive things, like a Home Server, but a store-bought NAS or a single PC is usually more performant. A PI cluster might be less power hungry in some scenarios.
Some people use them as build/test platforms for code that should run on ARM architectures. Others have used them to host a website from their internet connection (I know...).
Some people just have fun tinkering with such things....
Don't worry, it's not just you. I learn concepts by building and tinkering (and reading specifications), so you'd think I'm a target market. But when I wanted to get some hands on experience with a cluster file system, for a job, I spun up a cluster of 5 vms on... my normal computer.
4 seems like a very useless number to me. 4 raspis is more expensive and less useful than a used dual xeon on ebay. I could imagine maybe there's a use for something with 16 slots? or at least 8? But I don't get these cluster boards (or, for that matter, storage enclosures!) which presume I can do something fundamentally different with 4 small computes than 1.
The original Turing Pi had 7 slots (wish it had even more!). I do feel that was better, because it really forces you to manage it as a cluster.
Spinning up VMs is sort of fine, but they don't have quite the performance or management characteristics of a real cluster. The network is slow, the nodes individually are not very powerful, you have to work out how to image each physical machine, nodes break or have I/O errors, ...
> maybe there's a use for something with 16 slots? or at least 8?
You can always connect 2 or 4 of these together.
But I understand what you mean. A project I want to build one day, when I have the time and learn ethernet interfacing through PCB's is to build a single board cluster of Octavo SoM modules. They are individually inexpensive and it'd be relatively easy to build a board with a dozen of them connected to a switch chip.
Yeah exactly, my first thought is that a normal multicore PC is going to be not just more powerful, but more power efficient and cost efficient. It's a fun idea but I wouldn't be interested unless they publish some comparisons.
Basically everything here can be done on a single multicore computer (which is already a distributed system in many respects):
more powerful in most cases - yes. distributed - no.
learning about doing HA/Scale out via distributed systems is a really valuable skill, and projects like these make it sooo much more real, beyond even just basic networking.
