DIY Cluster Computing

With the cost of memory exploding, the price of RAM and SSDs have gone up, and this reverberates into lower demand for other PC parts. If this spirals into the personal computer industry going under, what options are left? Data center stuff requires cooling and power infrastructure that most don't have access to, so repurposing that isn't really an option. However, there's tons of low power consumer devices. So what are the most practical hardware and software solutions to combine their computing power? If I have shoe-box worth of old phones, could those be used together to make an effective replacement for a PC? Volunteer distributed computing already exists(Folding@home), but the point here is to own your own hardware and have it be useful for general use.

>>90173 laptops soykafty laptops with low-spec OSes refurbished laptops Linux - or, at least, Windows with telemetry and AI features cut off to save RAM - atop any of the above Besides, there is a "surplus" of old PCs/lappys to use through. Not sure about the vidya, but...

Looks like hard drives are back in vogue thanks to AI datacentre fuarrrkery

I feel like Plan 9/9front would be great for this

I was discussing Beowulf clusters with an old roomate of mine and he didn't understand the utilty. He was more like " what are you even going to use that for?" and at the time(circa 2010) all I could think of was SETI or a similar project. It is my understanding that in some configurations the machines all have to have the same specs.

>>90173 >useful for general use Can you get more specific? If you want to run everyday software (e.g. image processing, video games), this is obviously not going to work. Maybe look up bandwidth and latency of USB vs DDR4 for example if think it is that simple. If you are interested in parallelising specialized code to multiple nodes, you must get more specific if you want any help.

>>90173 >>90174 >>90179 >>90270 You prettu much can repurpose a 2018-or-so celly as a homemade device similar to Google AnyCast. * Say, you can get your hands on 2018 Samsung S8 or S8+ * get a funny USB to HDMI cable * use said 2018 Samsung as your DEX device. Yeah! 2018 Samsung S8 has just this feature!

>>90972 Lapdocks might become the norm. Instead of buying two devices in excess of $1000, you'll just have to buy one.

>>90972 For other phones, there's been progress made on running Windows programs on Android phones: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator Video guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Sn3t3cmR0 Granted, it requires more powerful hardware, so older phones will have issues. >>90173 My contribution to the thread: turning phones into pirate boxes. All the things you would want in a pirate box: - Monero node - Cryptocurrency wallet(s) - Encrypted messaging server and service (SimpleX and/or Briar) - File sharing (Onionshare for smaller files, i2p/bittorrent for larger files) - Offline wiki/information archives (Kiwix for Wikipedia/various supported wikis) etc. All of these things can be had and run on a smartphone. Obviously, you have internet via multiple sources through SIM cards, eSIM, and standard wifi, but you can also use Ethernet adapters via USB-C. You can even proxy all traffic through various networks (VPN) or darknets (Tor, i2p, etc.). The main requirements are expandable storage (Monero nodes, Wikipedia data, and other files will fill up internal storage quickly) and fairly recent hardware for running multiple processes at the same time. But the form factor of a smartphone is perfect for turning them into DIY pirate boxes. You can enhance this by putting multiple labeled microSD cards and a SIM card removal tool inside the phone case itself (you *are* using a phone case for these, I hope) for various needs. I understand this isn't quite the definition of a "cluster computer" but it's close enough imo.

>>90173 It's better to repurpose devices for specific use cases rather than try to form a phone Megazord. Most programs don't even have good concurrency across cores of one cpu let alone cores of multiple cpus of different devices. You could run servers with termux on the phones to reduce the load on your main device. See Awesome-Selfhosted on github for inspiration (I would start with FreshRSS). IMO this is too laborious and time consuming and you be better off just coping with price hikes.

I wonder why no one is just physically attacking data centres or cutting off all sources of funding to AI techbros

RAM and hard drive shortage is partially due to AI and mostly manufactured by the government to hide the construction of the giant NSA facility in Utah codenamed "Bumblehive" https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

>>90330 >>91246 If a mesh hardware configuration became more common, couldn't software be written with that in mind?

Would be nice to have an auto-updated Linux distribution, which is configured to become a node in a big Kubernetes cluster after installation. People could donate their old hardware to the cluster. Other people would get namespaces in that cluster to host their stuff.

Huawei's HarmonyOS does this. Quoting from wikipedia: > HarmonyOS 5.x+ both discards the common Unix-like Linux kernel and replaces the previous multiple-kernel, kernel agnostic system from OpenHarmony with its own bespoke HarmonyOS microkernel as a single framework. > The system includes a communication base called DSoftBus for integrating physically separate devices into a virtual Super Device, allowing one device to control others and sharing data among devices with distributed communication capabilities. > HarmonyOS-native apps have access to capabilities such as distributed communications and cards. > The Service Collaboration Kit (SCK) provides users with cross-device interaction, allowing them to use the camera, scanning, and gallery functions of other devices. For example, tablets or 2-in-1 laptops can utilize these features from a connected smartphone. To utilize these features, both devices running HarmonyOS NEXT must be logged into the same Huawei account and have WLAN and Bluetooth enabled. Turns out when forced away from just skinning Android, manufacturers will actually develop interesting OSes.

>>91261 >if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear Can't make this soykaf up

>>91261 whose passion project is this website? I'm impressed