ARM yourselves! The Compute Blade is here.

this is the compute blade and I'm test driving it in a four node cluster this is the dev version and Ivan from uptime Lab sent four of these a four bay one U case and two fan modules he's been testing 40 of these in a racket jet brains for months and they're about to go live on Kickstarter but what are these for besides wielding them like Leonardo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of course but why build a cluster with these blades and what good are they if you can't even buy a compute module 4 from Raspberry Pi do any alternative compute modules work I'll get to all those questions in this video last year I posted a video on an early Alpha version of the board Ivan redesigned almost everything since then and came up with this and it looks gorgeous the blade has an m.2 slot and is powered through this ethernet connection up front the dev model has extras like a TPM module USB and HDMI ports and physical switches for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at the front there are a bunch of LEDs a button and a couple neopixels we'll get to those later on the opposite end there's a fan header there's just this basic fan board that holds a 40 millimeter fan in place or if you're lucky like me you have this one-of-a-kind over engineered Edition fan controller this thing has another Raspberry Pi on it in this case the tiny rp2040 microcontroller and it measures airflow temperatures and adjusts the fan speeds accordingly it also has neopixels on it as far as just getting air to flow over the pie goes yeah this is definitely Overkill but you don't need all the fancy magic this other fan module works just fine too both these fan modules slide into the back of the custom 1u blade chassis and the compute blade slide in the front side and sliding one out while looking at the back there's even a fancy limited edition signature straight for the compute Blade's Creator but turning it back around you see these custom red heat sinks well they work amazing but look underneath they're probably a nightmare to machine I'm not sure whether these will make it to mass production but they do work and look great the pies stayed under 42 degrees no matter what workload I threw at them even without heatsinks these blades Supply plenty of power and cooling for stable overclocking Ivan's been running 40 of them for months in the lab where he works and even running overclock there's been no downtime but the compute blade packs in some extra features the TPM and Dev versions both come with an integrated Infineon TPM 2.0 module TPM stands for trusted platform module and it can be used for secure embedded Computing especially paired with a zimbit which I'll get to later this chip stores encryption keys and secure passwords so someone couldn't steal a blade and get your data Ivan went a step further and place the chip under the compute module for better security even if someone got physical access to the blade they couldn't break into the TPM without unplugging the compute module that'd turn off power to the Chip And ideally lock all your data secure Computing is a little more complicated than I can get into here and the Raspberry Pi isn't perfect but the compute module does offer some improvements for trusted Boot and TPM that I'll touch on more in a future video continuing the theme of turning the Raspberry Pi Enterprise grade these blades also have two features that fit right in with other racked equipment this pull tab at the front is hinged so it can press this front button and these LEDs indicate SSD activity power and Pi activity plus there's a front and top mounted neopixel you can program to do whatever you want and you can also turn off all the LEDs in software if you want this demo python script uses the neopixels to display CPU temperature using different colors and it also allows the LED to be used for locating the blade if you have a bunch of these in a rack somewhere finding a particular blade might be tricky so you can trigger the neopixel than when you find the right blade press the button to dismiss it so there's more to this board than meets the eye but why what would you even use these things for well Ivan's original motivation was to get a bunch of arm computers running for continuous integration testing at jetbrains they build tons of software for developers and they need to test them on Macs PCS and yes even Raspberry Pi's and he's running 40 blades in 2u that's 160 arm cores 320 20 gigs of RAM and up to 320 terabytes of flash storage in one U of Rackspace that's actually useful for some people like if you want a relatively low power arm cluster for testing or research considering they're only burning a few watts each you could have 160 arm cores under 200 watts in 2u with 40 nvme drives beat that monster ampere server from a few videos ago and another advantage of running multiple smaller machines instead of a few large ones is resource isolation if you host lots of small apps there's a lot more security isolating them on their own servers many modern security problems are due to people running more and more services on one system sharing the same memory and CPU but in my case these blades make learning easier I test open source projects like kubernetes and Drupal k3s in particular runs great on Pi clusters and I have a whole open source Pi cluster setup that I've been working on for years it has built-in monitoring so you can see your cluster Health in real time and there are example Drupal and database deployments built in I've also tested storage clustering software like ceph which I also have in that Pi cluster project so go check that out on GitHub even if you just have regular old pies it's just more fun to do this stuff with physical computers running right next to me on my desk and sure I could run some VMS on a PC but that doesn't give me bare metal control and physical networking and performance per watt isn't bad at all if you're running certain workload it's like web services my cluster uses less than 30 Watts running four nvme drives under a hundred percent load and it's quietly sitting here on my desk but just running a bunch of Pies in a cluster is old news tons of people are running Pi clusters the blade though it takes pie clustering up a notch I even sent over some other accessories that he's been testing this is a zimkey 4 which is an additional Hardware security module that plugs into this header on the blade it has encrypted storage tamper sensors and a real-time clock built in and it turns the blade into a fully secure compute node Ivan also made a custom board using zimbit's hsm-4 security module using that he made this demo where if you pull out the blade it can react to that by doing things like automatically destroying sensitive data and if you're drooling over the idea of secure Computing on the pi well make sure you're subscribed you're not going to want to miss my video on this thing not even Redshirt Jeff can hack it the rest of the world isn't standing still though pine64 launched their own blade too I haven't had time to fully test it out yet but did throw both the so quartz and a compute module 4 on it to see how it performs the integrated Poe circuit had a bit of coil lines sometimes and none of the images I downloaded for so quartz would give me working HDMI or nvme yet so I swapped over to a compute module 4. my emmc version worked fine with HDMI networking and nvme all present but a light cm4 didn't work it would just go to the rainbow screen when it booted up so Pine 64's blade seems functional but it's definitely more Bare Bones and doesn't seem to be fully supported yet if the compute blade gives you a slice of pie the so quartz blade feels like it came out a little Half Baked and I know how hard it is to find a Raspberry Pi right now I get it just looking at rpilocator.com it's pretty bleak but there are four other compute module clones you can buy now all of them say they're pin compatible with the compute module 4. and I have three of them to test I actually ordered a BPI cm42 but it's still stuck somewhere between China and my house but I do have these other clones big tree techs CB1 pine64 so quartz and rad says cm3 they're all meant to be drop-in Replacements though the CB1 doesn't support PCI Express so I didn't test it on this board check out my live stream from October where I tested the CB1 and talked more about the pi shortage but the so quartz does have PCI Express so I tested it I actually did a whole video on it and the sam3 over a year ago back then it was hard to even get these boards to boot have things improved since then well a little a lot of Raspberry Pi clones take the approach of throw Hardware at the wall and see what sticks but if spec sheets were everything Raspberry Pi would have just been a tiny footnote in Computing history the big difference is in support and Raspberry Pi has that in Spades especially with the raspberry pios heck even orange pie started getting in that game with their own custom OS last year if I head over to pine64's download page for the so quartz it's a mess there are six different os's listed and the page doesn't recommend any of them in fact it even says right on the page the first three images don't even work and I get that pine64 is community based but anyone besides a developer who comes into the pine64 ecosystem and expects to be productive is in for a rough ride that said after reading this blog post it looked like I might have the best experience with armbian so I looked on armbian's website and to my surprise the so quartz wasn't even listed so I kept searching and found that for some reason the recommended armbian download was hosted on a forum that wasn't even related to either pine64 or armbian it's not even apparent how that image was built it it felt sketchy but I downloaded the image anyway and it wouldn't download it got to 250 megabytes and got stuck I tried it a few times but I just couldn't get that to work so I switched gears and tested plebeian Linux instead plebeian's goal is to get vanilla Linux running without any hacky Rock Chip patches this time the download worked and it actually booted right up which was a nice surprise at this point but it doesn't support HDMI or Wi-Fi yet and even though I could see my nvme drive with lspci it seems the OS can't use it it got this error message and didn't show up when I tried to use it so it's a bit of a mess but at least I can say the so quartz does run on the compute blade it's just a matter of software support the rad so cm3 is still giving me trouble flashing in OS so I couldn't test it out yet maybe I'm just unlucky but it's definitely not all rainbows and butterflies with this cm4 clone if you do still want to use one splurge on the dev version of the compute blade though because you might need access to MicroSD and HDMI for debugging so for production use I don't recommend the Clones yet they're slower and they just don't work out of the box like a pie does even though it pains me to say this hold out for compute module fours Raspberry Pi said stock should improve through 2023. let's hope that's true and I asked Ivan if there was any way he could get a batch of cm4s to sell on Kickstarter for early backers but he said it would be months even with a bulk order but regardless the compute blade is a great way to run pies and clusters in fact it's my favorite way so far it's just so satisfying sliding these things in and watching them run in a rack Ivan's working on a metal 1u rack mount enclosure too but I couldn't convince him to ship me 16 more blades just yet the price is a little steep if you're just tinkering with some Raspberry Pi's but if you have specific needs for dense arm compute nodes or if you just want the coolest pie board on the market the compute blade is worth a look it's been fun watching the design of these blades from this first proof of concept version all the way to production watching Ivan tweak every single part of this board until it became what it is today it'll launch on Kickstarter this week with three models a basic version for 60 bucks a TPM version for 69 and the dev version for 90. though those prices weren't 100 final when I recorded this video check out all the details on the kickstarter linked below and until next time I'm Jeff geerling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 297,986

Keywords: raspberry pi, compute, module, blade, compute blade, cm4, soquartz, pine64, poe, power over ethernet, ethernet, network, cluster, server, homelab, sysadmin, rack, computing, arm, arm64, ci, continuous integration, jetbrains, ivan, merocle, uptime lab, labs, 1u, rackmount, radxa, cm3, banana pi, orange pi, bpi, bigq, bigtreetech, cb1, clone, replacement, kubernetes, k3s, kioxia, ninja, leondardo, red shirt jeff, tpm, trusted platform module, infineon, rtc, neopixel, clustering

Id: rKDGlpnP-vE

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023