Introduction

I’m working on building a cluster of Raspberry Pi CM4 compute blades. I plan on using the cluster to learn a bunch of stuff, but I need to be able to provision the blades automatically. This repo is my work in that area.

There are some assumptions made:

  1. All the systems involved are Debian-ish systems, particularly Ubuntu. The build system here will assume this. It may work on non-Ubuntu apt-based systems. For non-Debian systems, I’ve also been working on including container builds that may work.

  2. The primary target for this setup is Ubuntu 22.04. This needs to be validated still.

There are three physical types of systems:

  • dev indicates DEV compute blades.

  • tpm indicates TPM compute blades.

  • adm indicates an admin system, which will likely be a CM4 carrier board in non-blade form. I foresee two types of systems: adm runs administrative services (such as a PXE boot server) and gw managing networking with the outside world.

The computeblade docs has a description of the different blade types.

Below is a diagram of the planned system.

digraph cluster { subgraph { dev01; dev02; dev03; dev04; dev05; tpm01; tpm02; tpm03; tpm04; tpm05; pi401; pi402; pi403; pi404; } "poe-switch" -> dev01 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> dev02 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> dev03 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> dev04 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> dev05 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> tpm01 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> tpm02 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> tpm03 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> tpm04 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> tpm05 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> pi401 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> pi402 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> pi403 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> pi404 [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> haven [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> build [dir=both]; "poe-switch" -> controller [dir=both]; publicnet -> controller [dir=both]; }

Hardware

The hardware isn’t slated to arrive until September at the earliest. I am leaning towards having the 1TB NVMe drives go with the AI modules, and use the gateway system as the storage machine if needed.

Item

Quantity

Notes

TPM blade

5

TPM 2.0

DEV blade

6

TPM 2.0, µSD, nRPIBOOT

CM4

10

8GB RAM, no eMMC/WiFi/BT

CM4

2

8 GB RAM, eMMC/WiFi/BT (gw, dev blade)

SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus 500GB

4/7

2280

SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus 1 TB

2/4

2280 (1 allocated to gw)

RTC module

10

DS3231

AI module

3

2x Coral TPU

CM4 carrier board

1

Dual-homed, NVMe slot, Zymbit 4i

Netgear GS316PP

1

16-port PoE+ (183W)

Logical roles

Aside from the physical hardware types, there are essentially cluster nodes and meta nodes. The cluster nodes are the compute blades, and meta are any additional systems involved. Individual nodes might be tagged with roles as well to indicate additional capabilities, such as ai for cluster nodes with TPUs or storage for cluster nodes with additional (e.g. 1TB) storage.