M1 Mini Cluster?

[MBX]

Is it possible to cluster many of the M1 Mini's to act as one?

Let's say clustering 10 Mac Mini's to act as one computer (with one desktop).

How would you achieve it? And each one has to use it's own AC plug I assume (?)

 

[pldelisle]

Not possible. In fact, no computer can be "grouped" and have only one desktop. There are three types of cluster computers, load balancing clusters, for resource distribution. High-performance clusters, sometimes called supercomputers, to pool resources (CPU, RAM, disk) for high computational cost workloads. And there are high availability clusters that are predominantly for redundancy or failure recovery. Either you'll have scheduler to launch tasks or your software need to support distributed/parallel computation. You can try https://microk8s.io, but the build for macOS ARM will likely not be available. Maybe homebrew can compile it from source, I don't know. It will also likely require Docker, which is not stable on M1 at the moment.

It depends of your workload. What do you want to achieve with such a setup ? Is your goal running parallel/distributed computations ?