A Compute Cluster the Size of a Soda Can

Recent RAM price hikes aside, single-board computers are so inexpensive these days that it is hard to avoid buying a stack of them to turn into a homelab. Geek Of All Trades knows this feeling, and has done exactly that. But rather than just buying a bunch of boards and stuffing them on the corner of a desk, he has demonstrated how we can make a more professional — and useful — homelab from tiny computers.

Geek Of All Trades has been working with a Sipeed NanoCluster, which can rack up to seven Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or 5 boards, or Sipeed’s own 3H or M4N modules. Board types can be mixed, and each is capable of hosting its own individual NVMe drive for storage. Nodes are connected to an onboard managed switch, which provides external access via a single gigabit Ethernet port. A fan is provided for cooling, but Geek Of All Trades notes that it is very loud and no speed control is available.

For his own homelab, Geek Of All Trades populated the NanoCluster with a set of four Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 boards, each with a 128GB NVMe drive. Proxmox was installed on the cluster with the help of the Pimox project, as Proxmox itself does not support ARM chips. This software ran on top of Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

To demonstrate what is possible with a cluster like this, each node was given a different purpose. One ran a Pi-hole container, while the others ran NGINX, N8N, and Grafana. Of course these applications can be tailored to each individual's needs.

But what is a tiny cluster like this really good for? Well, a lot of things. Geek Of All Trades notes that it is especially well-suited for testing multi-node Docker setups, failover testing, experimenting with load balancing, and installing systems like Kubernetes. Edge computing applications are also ideal given the tiny footprint and minimal power consumption of the cluster.

Geek Of All Trades has plenty of tips for those interested in building their own NanoCluster, so be sure to check out the video below.