SBC Clusters are a terrible value, but they're fun anyway

Jeff Geerling reviews the DeskPi Super4C, a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that improves on the older Super6C with remote management via ESP32 and redundant Ethernet/power inputs. He benchmarks it against student clusters from the SBCC 2026 competition, where university teams competed with $6,000 HPC cluster budgets. The Super4C lands in the middle of the pack for both HPL performance and efficiency. Geerling is candid that SBC clusters offer poor value compared to mini PCs — a minimum build costs ~$600 and his full setup ran ~$1,400 — but argues they're worthwhile for learning HPC, edge computing experiments, or ARM build farms at desk scale.