My plan for a Franken-network: distributed computing on the edge

I have this idea for a home network that I'm going to be working on indefinitely. The idea is that I have a bunch of old Optiplexes, Raspberry Pis, even an old Mac Mini just laying around in closets that have either been abandoned or replaced. I want to bring them back to life and create a distributed computing environment on my home network. The idea will be to get as much distributed compute as I can get with spending as little money as possible. I'm going to start with just putting one network service on each machine, but eventually the setup will have Kubernetes supported everywhere so that some management service can deploy services to the machines they are best suited. Also, since I'm recycling old machines (even planning on some running on solar), I can assume boxes' status will be inconsistent. The Kubernetes controller could shuffle services around when a machine dies or when new ones are added to the network.

Currently, there are a few services up and running: a media server (and associated services ending in -arr), a NAS, an Ollama server, and a web server for a dashboard and interacting with the other services. Eventually, I would like to have some kind of dedicated distributed compute (low power HPC), multiple AI models tuned to various tasks, the k8s controller to manage all these resources, maybe even an image server, home automation, and home security all on this distrbuted edge computing system.

I'm going to be documenting the process here as I go along, so stay tuned.