Building A Water Cooled Raspberry Pi 4 Cluster

[Music] if you've watched some of my recent videos then you've probably seen that i built a water cooled raspberry pi 4 a couple of weeks ago it came out looking better than i expected and the cooling system performed really well too this was obviously a crazy overkill for a single raspberry pi but it isn't actually why i bought the water cooling kit i bought it along with seven other raspberry pis so that i could try building my own water cooled park cluster while water cooling a single raspberry pi doesn't make too much sense water cooling a whole cluster is a bit more practical the water cooling system is much quieter than having eight small fans all screaming in unison it works really well to keep the past cool and actually cost a bit less than some other cooling solutions given that i'd have to buy eight of them for those of you who don't know what a park cluster is it's essentially a set of two or more raspberry pi's which are connected together on a local network and work together to perform computing tasks by sharing the load there's usually one power which is designated as the host or master node and is in charge of breaking up the task into smaller tasks and sending these out to all the other nodes to work on the master node then compiles all the completed tasks back into a final result to build my cluster i got together 8 raspberry pis a network switch a usb power supply and then the water cooling kits cooling blocks and a bunch of network cables usb c cables standoffs and screws to put it all together i started off by making eight acrylic brackets to hold the cooling blocks in position over each part cpu these are the same design as the ones used in my previous video but are now ready to suit the cables and fan [Music] do each bracket consists of two parts which are glued together to hold the cooling block in place [Music] i also have to include a spacer to lift the cooling block a bit higher off the cpu so that it clears the surrounding components otherwise i'd have to remove the display connector from all 8 raspberry pi's the cooling block mounts onto the part by securing the power between some red standoffs which will screw into the base and some nylon standoffs with a cooling block to screw into the bracket picks up on the holes on the standoffs and clamps the cooling block down onto the pi cpu [Music] i then repeated this seven more times for the other parts the traditional way to build a power cluster is to place standoffs on each part and then mount them on top of each other to form a stack this is the easiest and most compact way to assemble them but doesn't really work that well with my cooling block bracket and isn't all that eye-catching this got me thinking of a way to better lay out the cluster so the cooling water circuit was clearly visible and the cluster was both functional and eye-catching even better would be if it could be mounted onto a wall i played around with a couple of layout options considering the placement of the components to minimize cable and tube links and trying to maintain some symmetry to keep it looking neat i settled for having four parts on each side of the radiator keeping the large fan as the focal point of the design i'd be connecting the parts to the switch using some red patch leads and i bought a half power usb charging hub and some short usb c cables to power the parts [Music] once i had my layout in mind i started marking out my backboard i positioned all of the major components onto a piece of mdf and then marked out where they'd be placed and the holes needed to mount them i checked the clearances required for the cables and then planned the cooling water tube layout it was at this point that i realized that having four powers arranged in a square would result in an unnecessarily complex water cooling loop so i switched to having the four parts in a straight line on each side i also had to make a decision on how best to run the cooling water loop if i put each pie in series then the first will be the coolest in the loop and each will get progressively warmer with the last one running the warmest if i put the pars in parallel then i'll all receive the same temperature water but balancing the flow rate becomes a problem it's quite likely that one or two each other furthers the wave would receive little to no flow through them i decided that warm water was better than no water and i didn't want about eight valves to try and balance the flow rate between them so i set out connecting them in series i also had a gap at the top where there's a lot of free space so i decided to pull out an old touch panel which i'd use on a previous project having a display for the master node meant that i'd have a way to monitor the system and even display stats graphs or diagnostics directly on the cluster i finished marking out the layout and then cut the board to size using a [Music] dremel to mount the raspberry pi's i decided to design and laser cut a small acrylic base this would add a red accent and guide the power cable through to the back i also designed a couple of cable and tube management stands [Music] i then marked out the positions for all the mounting holes and drilled them out i decided to add some wooden sections to the back of the board to stiffen it and to create an area behind the board for the cable management and power supply [Music] i also made holes underneath the acrylic bases for the usb cables to run through [Music] i then sprayed the front and the back of the board black [Music] i mounted the parts to the network switch in the cooling water components [Music] do [Music] the last thing to add was the display which i mounted onto an acrylic face panel with some acrylic side supports to hold it you'll notice that i had to mount the master node a bit lower than the others so that i could get the hdmi cable in without clashing with the pi next to it i tied up all of the cables at the back of the cluster using some cable ties and cable holders which i cut out of the acrylic and glued into place as a final touch i added an rgb led strip onto the back to create some accent lighting on the wall behind it with that all done i just needed to fill the cooling water circuit with water and hope that i didn't drown one of the parts luckily there were no major leagues there was one slow leak on the inlet to the first cooling block probably because of the twist and pressure on the tube to get to the radiator i clamped the tube with a small cable tie and the leak stopped all the cooling water loop needed now with some colour [Music] i prepared a copy of raspberry pi os lut on seven micro sd cards and a copy of raspberry pi os on the eighth for the master node i could then power up the cluster and check that they're all booted up the system was initially quite noisy as the air bubbles worked they were out of the cooling water loop but it eventually settled down [Music] the display is a nice way to visualize stats for the cluster here i'm just running the script i used previously to display the cpu temperature of the master node i'm not going to get into the software side of the cluster in this video as there are a number of options depending on what you'd like to do with it and how experienced you are with network computing but i'll be sure to cover that in a future video so make sure that you subscribe to follow my future projects i hope you've enjoyed following this build with me please leave a like if you did and turn on notifications to follow my future projects

Channel: Michael Klements

Views: 561,659

Keywords: raspberry pi, raspberry pi 4b, raspberry pi 4, pi 4, pi cluster, raspberry pi cluster, cluster, network computing, pi 4 cluster, water cooled, water cooling, water cooled pi, water cooled cluster, liquid cooled cluster, liquid cooling, fan, radiator, display, hdmi display, tp link, ethernet switch, pi cluster network, raspberry pi cooling, cooling solution, cluster computing, kubernetes, node

Id: PUAIIibXMYw

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021