This may lead to accusations of over-engineering, but I solved a problem and had fun while doing so. The four node cluster runs two different types of 5V fan, two fans are fairly quiet but clearly noticeable and two are somewhat loud. All in all the cluster is too loud, and noise aside, it’s silly to be running fans at full tilt when there is no need for cooling. The plan The VisionFive2 board has a 5V fan header, but no electronics behind it to allow regulating (or even switching on/off) the fan.

Building a chassis for a 19" 1U four node cluster of StarFive VisionFive2 boards. Getting the boards set up with a clean Debian Trixie install on on-board NVME storage was treated in the previous post. Now we need to create an enclosure that will fit four of these boards in a single unit of a shallow 19" wall-mounted rack. Why the dimensions? First of all, organising computers and switches and the like in a 19" rack is just convenient.

A house without a cluster is just a house. In order to run mail, website, git, batch processing and whatever other services you can imagine needing servers in the basement for, I set out to find an interesting and exciting while still economical solution. Bit of background Through my career I have worked with many hardware architectures. I have written assembly for x86, Sparc, UltraSparc, PA-RISC, Power2, Power PC, Alpha and other processors over the years and I have written high performance software for all of them in higher level languages too (Fortran, C, C++).