What the NUC Kind of Cluster is This???

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[jcugnoni]

Reminds my several 'Beowulf' clusters for scientific computation that I built 10+ years ago by stacking miniITX small for factor I5-3450s (4core 16Gb ram each) and hooked them to a gigabit switch. Node0 was running Ubuntu with storage pools, management tools and the other nodes were booting by tftp with all the files hosted node0. DRBL linux package was handling the whole boot, os config of the nodes, network mounts magically. This cluster has served us well for dynamic fluid/structure simulation using MPI for more than 7 years and was totally unbeatable in perf/dollar. Maybe I could do that with those mini pcs. With the current CPU perf / watt and core count this ciuld be great..

[Foiliagegaming]

I’m in the process of building a new lab and I have been struggling on what to get. This has helped me a bit. Thank Level1techs!

[bosstowndynamics]

I'd love to see some more stuff specifically on hyperconvergence itself, what software supports it (XCP, Proxmox, eventually TrueNAS etc), how to use it, when to use it and maybe even using it with mixed hardware setups for the homelabber with a need for more PCIe lanes than these mini PCs can provide.

[echtogammut]

I bought my mother one of the MinisForum "game" PC's to replace the MicroITX computer I built her a couple years back. For the money, I couldn't build something better and certainly not as small. I was really impressed with the little thing.

[bcredeur]

I had no idea thunderbolt could be used for networking like this. This is genius!

[TechnoTim]

Cattle not pets! Build availability into the solution, not into each device! Love it!

[AlexSchendel]

I personally would love to see more Thunderbolt (or USB4 for that matter) adoption in desktop motherboards.

[upgrayedd]

So happy to see another happy outcome! Your hard work is making a difference!

[lostphotographs]

Wendel looking good Sir! Great content from the team. 2.5 G in a NUC is a win.

[LampJustin]

Yeah, the video I've been waiting for ever since NUCs popped with two TB3 interfaces 😊🎉 Real sad, that the latency is that high though. That makes it totally unusable for replicated storage...

[physx_yt]

That's pretty cool, no added power consumption and heat from extra networking cards and for a cluster like this, the limit on the cable length is not an issue.

I would be interested in the possibility of using a thunderbolt 4 hub to take all of this to the next level, but that would add cost and complexity and I suspect that a hub wouldn't work with multiple hosts in the first place, as that's not what it was designed for.

[gmanyyavailable]

If you do eGPU you'd know that Thunderbolt's 40 Gbit number is a marketing term. It can only do 40 Gbit in DisplayPort mode. In PCIe mode it goes down to 32 Gbit (four lanes of PCIe 3.0), but somehow this is before protocol overhead. After protocol overhead, you get maximum 2.2 GiB/s transfer speeds very best case scenario

[mikegrok]

I have a Genoa 9124 with an air cooler. After boot is is actually very quiet. The cpu has a max power of 200 watts, but the chip area is enormous, so it has no trouble getting rid of the heat.

[alexlovett]

Love this stuff, I looked into it a while ago but with IP over USB3 which is a very accessible connector (a lot of homelabbers don’t have modern thunderbolt systems but old laptops / mini pcs).

Would love to see if that’s possible (haven’t got round to trying it myself).

[benjamintrathen]

Yay finally the NUC cluster, I have been looking forward to this since you mentioned in another video

[benjamintrathen]

I have often wondered why there is no daisy chain cable? For nucs with only 1 thunderbolt port this would be nice.

[GabrielFoote]

That in inconsistent ping is um... concerning

[marcin_karwinski]

Great thing for a K3OS or similar Kubernetes cluster on bare metal OS...

[Toddimus]

Would this work with USB3.2 (gen2x2, or whatever the 20Gbit version is called)? Even if it’s not explicitly called Thunderbolt? I’m assuming it would definitely work with USB4.

[MyAJVideo]

FYI old lenovo micro pcs have PCI so you could add a network card :D