Ask HN: The most CPU and memory at the lowest cost?

1 points by canterburry 10y ago ↗ HN

We are considering building our own scrappy big data cluster but want to do this at an extreme low budget. Since it will only be used by our own internal data sciences team for analysis and experimentation, we don't need crazy redundancy or production grade hardware.

So, does anyone have any suggestions on cheap, even consumer grade, hardware to buy and squeeze the most CPUs and memory into a low budget and ideally the smallest space?

Would just stacking a bunch of micro ATX/mini-ITX boards make sense (maybe even without cases) screwed to some boards we can rack? We probably new a few terabytes of memory so maybe the limited memory slots will be a shortcoming.

Has anyone here done this? None of us are necessarily hardware pros.

2 comments

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LarryMade2 10y ago ↗

I think this is inspirational... Cheap hardware fault tolerant software...

http://americanhistory.si.edu/press/fact-sheets/google-corkb...

kjs3 10y ago ↗

Microcenter.com occasionally has these crazy deals on AMD FX processors + motherboard bundles where the processor is heavily discounted and they give you $40 off a motherboard. This has let me build out several 8-core, 16GB DDR3 (expandable to 32GB usually) + case + smallish disk systems for crash and burn use for around $300. They're not exactly Xeons, but for what I'm doing, they're perfect.