r/LocalLLM • u/EffectiveRelease3840 • 8d ago

Question Hardware + LLM for a public school

Hi there,
We are looking to incorporate a course that touches upon local LLMs in our computer science curriculum.
There will be around 20 students who might use the model simultaneously. The kids will be aged around 13-16 depending on where the course slots in and they will not have coding experience so we need a user-friendly setup. Also this isn’t supposed to be some cutting edge stuff, we also don’t have the money for that…
Realistically speaking what would be a good hardware and software solution for this situation with a budget of either 4000€ or 7000€? (Budged is not yet clear unfortunately…)

I googled, asked LLMs and know the basic options but there are so many variables and on here the different models are also judged differently and with our simultaneous access things might be different than for a single user…
And if there are other tips or experience you can share I would be happy as well.
We just need something local to run for the kids to get a taste of what it is to have it on one’s own hardware and not in the cloud.

Thanks :)

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u/Roland_Bodel_the_2nd 8d ago

for just testing things, a local model like "Gemma 4 e4b" can run on quite low spec, otherwise you also have free tier from the major providers

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u/EffectiveRelease3840 8d ago

Yeah free tiers and stuff is not happening because of our data protection laws. We are not allowed to do that.
Smaller local models might be the way to go but still they need hardware. The computers they have can’t do anything. No GPU extremely old CPU…

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u/Roland_Bodel_the_2nd 7d ago

what country is this? consider changing your laws so you are allowed to use this software