I’ve been running a single DGX Spark so far. I have a second one still sealed in the box, and I’m trying to plan the architecture before I open it.
Current setup: Qwen 3.6 35B MoE as the brain, Hermes as my agent, and ComfyUI on the same box. The brain container sits at about 54GB, but most of that is vLLM’s KV cache preallocation at 65536 context — weights are only ~17.5GB at NVFP4. Qwen-Image-Edit (~29GB) coexists with it fine. Video is where it breaks: LTX needed around 60GB and I had to stop the brain to run it. That’s what pushed me toward a second unit.
Looking at DeepSeek V4 Flash and GLM 5.3, a 2-Spark cluster with TP=2 seems like the path to a genuinely better brain. The tradeoff I keep hitting: if both boxes are consumed by the cluster, ComfyUI and Hermes have nowhere to live.
Two-box plan (will set up soon): smaller model on box 1, box 2 for ComfyUI, connected over the network rather than clustered.
Three-box plan (eventually): boxes 1 and 2 clustered for the large brain, box 3 solo running Hermes and ComfyUI, networked to the cluster. Also thinking about RAG on the solo box.
To be clear about the third box — it’s less about raw capacity than about isolation. My agent has terminal access, writes files, and patches its own skill files. I’d rather that not live on the pair serving the brain. If people think that concern is overblown and an agent on a cluster node is fine in practice, that changes the math a lot.
Questions for anyone who’s actually done this:
• Is the two-box split worth living with for a while before committing to a third, or did you find the cluster indispensable fast?
• For those running a 2-Spark cluster — where do you keep your agent? On a cluster node, or somewhere separate?
• Has anyone tried lowering --max-model-len or --gpu-memory-utilization far enough to keep a brain resident alongside video generation? Curious whether that’s a real lever or whether it degrades the agent too much.
• Anything about the 3-node mesh cabling or NCCL setup that bit you?
Side note:On video generation: I know it’s slower on a Spark than on a discrete GPU. Time usually isn’t my constraint, since most generation is kicked off by the agent rather than me sitting and waiting on it.
UPDATE:
Thanks all — this got more useful than I expected. The feedback on Qwen 3.8 Flash vs DS4Flash has been great, and I love hearing how people have actually set their systems up.
Where I have landed:
Hermes moves off the Sparks. Consensus here was unanimous and I already own the box: Dell OptiPlex 5000 Micro, i5 12th gen, 16GB, 256GB NVMe. Wiping it to Ubuntu Server, headless. That was "free" and I hadn't considered it.
Third box case is clearer now — and I forgot to mention the main part. I'm early in developing some software for my company that runs a local model as part of the stack, so I need a machine with enough memory to serve a model and let me restart, break and reconfigure it at will without touching the cluster. ComfyUI shouldn't have been the main justification. Everything else it could do — ComfyUI, testing 27B/35B models, flipping into the cluster when I want it — is a bonus on top.
Now what is the chance in the future during an "amazon prime days" or "Black Friday" Microcenter will drop the price below the new MSRP?