I recently backed the Pine64 platform on Kickstarter. Choosing the hardware platform for my next cluster was not as much fun as I would have wanted, but fortunately Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall helped steer me from a bad decision or two on Facebook. His post on the Raspberry Pi Zero is well worth the read for those of us who want to focus on the code rather than the hardware.

Anyway, this coming April – maybe sooner – I’ll have the 64+ 2GB Group Package in hand. It’s 10x PINE A64+ 2GB with power supplies (10) and 4K HDMI cables (10) Bluetooth 4.0/802.11BGN chip (10).

It’s also what I would call a good start. Having built a few clusters, this is well in my comfort zone. It’s not in everyone’s comfort zone, though, but it could be. This Make step by step instruction list for building a 4 Raspberry Pi cluster makes it simple for someone to start.

Clearly, I have some greater aspirations than 4 nodes. I wanted my next cluster to be 64 bit because I want the processing bandwidth. For what? For cool geeky stuff! I have ideas I want to play with.

But why would you want a cluster? Read this and decide.