A couple years ago I wanted to see how dense I could pack ARM compute into a 4U chassis without turning it into an oven. =)
So I built this 125-node Orange Pi 5 cluster in my garage.
A lot of people told me the back rows would overheat. They didn’t.
The system is roughly 1,000 CPU cores, around 500GB of RAM, and the whole thing can run at about 1kW or less. Up to now it’s basically lived as 125 separate machines.
Now we’re bringing it back online for our game and starting the next phase: trying to unify it into a real cluster so we can use it for things like:
- large-scale NPC / AI behavior simulation
- hammering dedicated servers with fake players to find bottlenecks
- distributed build / test jobs
A friend with deep Kubernetes experience is helping me see how far we can push it.
Honestly I’m curious what you guys would run on something like this.