I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I’ll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.
But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that’s not what we do here, right? Right now I’m assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers
I would want to do a cluster. Just to learn how that works. But just thinking of the electricity cost, I would personally donate them.
Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.
These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.