They're using Pi Zero's in this post, which draw much less than others, between 0.4W and 1.0W, probably safe to assume 0.7W as an average load [1]
And at $5 each, if we're talking hardware costs for setting up a "toy" cluster for, say, self-learning or student labs, that's hard to beat. I suppose you could do better using VMs for a virtual cluster, but that adds other complications unrelated to the clustering task. But I agree there doesn't otherwise seem to be much practical purpose here, and the overhead of running an OS on each Pi really cuts into performance compared to a single chip w/ multicores instead.
And at $5 each, if we're talking hardware costs for setting up a "toy" cluster for, say, self-learning or student labs, that's hard to beat. I suppose you could do better using VMs for a virtual cluster, but that adds other complications unrelated to the clustering task. But I agree there doesn't otherwise seem to be much practical purpose here, and the overhead of running an OS on each Pi really cuts into performance compared to a single chip w/ multicores instead.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/raspberry-p...