What is turing-pi-2-cluster?

This repository, created by Jeff Geerling, is a set of automation scripts for setting up a mini-computer cluster on a Turing Pi 2 board. A Turing Pi 2 lets you plug multiple Raspberry Pi compute modules into a single board, essentially creating a tiny, self-contained data center. The scripts automate all the tedious setup work, from configuring the network to installing software, so you end up with a working cluster that can run applications across multiple computers. Note that this project is deprecated, meaning the author has moved active development to a newer repository. The automation is built with Ansible, a tool that lets you control multiple computers from a single workstation. You provide Ansible with a list of your computers (in this case, four Raspberry Pis named turing-node-1 through turing-node-4) and some basic configuration details. When you run the provided playbooks (which are basically instruction files), Ansible connects to each Pi over your network and configures them automatically. It sets up one Pi as the "control plane" (the leader) and the rest as worker nodes, then installs K3s, a lightweight version of Kubernetes that coordinates the cluster. The setup goes beyond basic cluster installation. It can configure a custom network so the cluster operates on its own isolated subnet, which is useful if you want to run it remotely. In fact, the author includes configurations for connecting a 4G LTE modem for off-grid internet, and even sets up a reverse SSH tunnel so you can remotely access the cluster from anywhere. It also configures storage using ZFS, sets up Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring the cluster's health, and deploys a sample Drupal website so you can verify everything works. This is aimed at hobbyists and makers who want to experiment with clustered computing and Kubernetes on physical hardware without spending thousands on enterprise gear. A concrete example would be someone who bought a Turing Pi 2 to learn how distributed systems work, they could use these scripts to get a functional cluster running in an afternoon rather than manually configuring each Pi. The author also used this setup for YouTube videos, so viewers could follow along and replicate his environment. One notable tradeoff: the README warns that the hardware used was a pre-production prototype, so behavior may differ on production boards. The project is also explicitly deprecated in favor of a newer pi-cluster repository, so anyone using it today should be aware it won't receive updates.