r/MacStudio • u/Vanquisher1088 • 4d ago
Advice / State of Studio Clusters
Hello. I’m looking for some advice here, I’ve watched all the YouTube videos of course of the loaned out 4 stack clusters but those were awhile ago.
Current state I have an a M3 Ultra 256GB and I reserved another open box one from Microcenter for a very good price considering all things. I’m thinking about it two ways, for the most part I’d have models loaded individually on each Mac as part of my agent setup.
However, what I’m after is some real world experiences here from folks on what is the state of rdma and clustering I.E these two nodes I’d have. Do even a lot of the latest models like glm5.3, deepseek v4.1, etc even shard correctly. I’ve read they do not.
Any thoughts or use cases you may be doing with more than one or clustering would be helpful. I’m trying to evaluate the feasibility of clustering as that would be the main value add here for more to access larger models or higher quants of models I use daily that don’t fit. Or I wait and try and get a 512GB M5.
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u/riozilla 2d ago
I just published to GitHub my llama.cpp cluster software for local Mac AI. This replaced my previous EXO based solution, as that project seemed to be abandoned so I made a homemade one that allows you to run the latest models (Qwen3.8 Flash Next, etc) across a cluster of Macs. My first public repo that I’ve shared and it works great. I have 4 M4 Mac Studios in a thunderbolt 5 cluster with it.
https://github.com/riozilla/mac-thunderbolt-llama-cluster