The main issue I would see impeding this is power draw and heat. Unless you are rigged up to run this many machines (including appropriate UPSes) you may run into blowing fuses and needing almost as much power for air conditioning as you need to run the cluster.
If you had like 50 SoCs maybe, because the power draw and heat might be manageable. Something like a RaspberryPi or OrangePi.
I was looking at HP mini PCs. The ones that were for sale used 7th gen i5s with a 35W TDP. They’re sold with a 65W power brick so presumably the whole system would never draw more than that. I could run a 16 node cluster flat out on a little over a kW, which is within the rating of a single residential circuit breaker. I certainly wouldn’t want to keep it running all the time, but it’s not like I’d have to get my electric system upgraded if I wanted to set one up and run it for a couple of hours as an experiment.
I did a whole ago just to see what it was all about. Then got rid of the setup a week later. It’s a cool project but I needed the other boxes. If you need a huge amount of parallel operations (and want to self host) it’s a decent option.
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