A Raspberry Pi Cluster: Two Years in the Making (and Why It Might Not Be Worth It)
2025-09-19
After a two-year wait, the author finally assembled a 10-node Raspberry Pi cluster boasting 160GB of RAM. Following multiple rebuilds and extensive benchmarking, the cluster achieved 325 Gflops on the HPL benchmark, exhibiting slightly better energy efficiency than an $8000 Framework Desktop cluster. However, AI inference performance lagged significantly behind the Framework cluster due to llama.cpp's inability to leverage the Pi 5's iGPU. The conclusion? This cluster excels in high-density, low-power scenarios, but isn't cost-effective for most users.
Hardware
Raspberry Pi Cluster