plenipotentprotogod

A university near me must be going through a hardware refresh, because they've recently been auctioning off a bunch of ~5 year old desktops at extremely low prices. The only problem is that you can't buy just one or two. All the auction lots are batches of 10-30 units.

It got me wondering if I could buy a bunch of machines and set them up as a distributed computing cluster, sort of a poor man's version of the way modern supercomputers are built. A little research revealed that this is far from a new idea. The first ever really successful distributed computing cluster (called Beowulf) was built by a team at NASA in 1994 using off the shelf PCs instead of the expensive custom hardware being used by other super computing projects at the time. It was also a watershed moment for Linux, then only a few yeas old, which was used to run Beowulf.

Unfortunately, a cluster like this seems less practical for a homelab than I had hoped. I initially imagined that there would be some kind of abstraction layer allowing any application to run across all computers on the cluster in the same way that it might scale to consume as many threads and cores as are available on a CPU. After some more research I've concluded that this is not the case. The only programs that can really take advantage of distributed computing seem to be ones specifically designed for it. Most of these fall broadly into two categories: expensive enterprise software licensed to large companies, and bespoke programs written by academics for their own research.

So I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. Have any of you built or admind a Beowulf cluster? Are there any useful applications that would make it worth building for the average user?

I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.

I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?

I'm aware that the plastic handles probably disqualify these from being true "buy it for life", but the exciting thing for me is that they are relatively cheap and can be found on the shelf in most stores with an office supply section. It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of BIFL items are special order and cost several times more than their mainstream equivalent, so I wanted to shout out Scotch brand for maintaining such good serviceability on an item you can literally pick up at Walmart.

I just pulled apart a pair of these which was cutting horribly, gave each blade a couple passes on an oil stone, then reassembled and tightened them up with a drop of oil in the joint. They cut as well as the day they were bought, and the handles are still in good shape so I could see doing this several more times before I even have to consider replacing them.