manuel 🦋 @manuelbernhardt

I finally had a chance to rearrange my Pi5 cluster today. For the compute-only Pi5s (fan only, no USB/PCIe/NVMe), I got rid of the official Pi5 power supplies and replaced them with Anker PowerPort 6, which is common for Pi clusters. One of the reasons was that no matter what I did, the Pi5s didn't go beyond 9W of power consumption (3W idle). So, the official Pi5 power supply was overkill for my use case. Although the Anker PowerPort can handle 60W, I decided to be a good citizen and only connected 4 Pi5s to each unit, leaving plenty of extra overhead. By the way, they are connected to two different switches. 😅 While looking for some cables, I found my old AC Infinity fans, which I used to cool an Xbox. I thought, why not, and set them up to cool the power supplies. The fans have a thermal trigger, so they only run once the temperature goes beyond ~29°C/84F. By the way, I asked ChatGPT how to position the fans, and it suggested the push-pull configuration. I was skeptical at first, but it seems to work well. See the temperature in the image below. Let me know if there is a better way. Finally, I got these fancy USB-C cables that show the current power consumption. I like them and hope they last long enough since they are not cheap. 💸 P.S.: I'm still waiting for the official Raspberry Pi5 PoE HAT for my power-hungry Pi5s, which have NVMe disks. Let me know if you have any suggestions. #raspberrypi #pi5 #anker #usbc

This is how I save over $1000/mo on compute, storage, and bandwidth costs for my AI side projects: a total of 52 CPU cores, 104GB RAM, 3TB NVMe, unlimited ingress/egress, and less than 100W power consumption. The taller cluster runs API servers built with the Transformer.js library and the NATS services framework. The shorter cluster runs a Postgres database server (with streaming replication) and some services such as pgpool, prometheus, etc. They are all connected to the cloud via NATS using a secure WireGuard tunnel. No DNS server, no port forwarding, no load balancers. #raspberrypi #pi5 #AI #edge @nats_io @xenovacom @PineberryPi