[HH] Field Expedient Supercomputing from Canonical

[Federico Lucifredi]

On May 18, 2014, at 7:11 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com> wrote:

> [Splitting this off into a separate thread. Before careful when you
> start a new thread not to reply to an existing message. Most mail
> clients will link to the old thread via headers, regardless of the
> subject line changing.]
> 
> Kurt Keville wrote:
>> http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/05/the-orange-box-cloud-for-free-man.html
> 
> Federico posted a few tweets on this portable cluster. A collection of
> i5 CPUs mounted to the walls of a long, narrow box, covered in heat
> sinks, with a common power supply and Ethernet switch inside.
> 
> A neat concept.
> 
> The primary application seems to be as a training tool. Canonical will
> bring one to you and train you in using their cluster management tools
> using it. I think the price mentioned was $10K. I'm not sure if that's
> for the box, the training, or both. Do you get to keep the box, or is
> just a loaner during the training period?

10k is for 3 days of training sandwiching 2 weeks of box loan.
> 
> I'm wondering if they created custom motherboards for the nodes.

We did not, they are Intel NUCs.
> 
> The box itself is surprisingly empty inside. Just the walls and base of
> the box have circuits. Seems you could get greater density by stacking
> the bards, but that may not have been feasible without putting huge fans
> on it.

The idea is to be fanless, and to do that the i5s have to touch the walls. The box itself is a heatsink.

we made a prototype where the boards were in a fifferent position, but this is also better for access (usb to the bottom, reset pins lit by blue leds on the heatsink sides.

Best -F

_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C