So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't ECC Memory (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory</a>). Google some years ago did a study on DRAM errors in the wild, in order to determine if there was an actual need for ECC in modern datacenters / distributed computing applications (<a href="http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf</a>). The short summary was that yes, they did need it.<p>Given that the processors (<a href="http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz" rel="nofollow">http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Proc...</a>) that are on these NUCs don't support ECC, I would probably avoid these units for any real workload.<p>It bums me a out a little bit that there is only a 1G fabric on these, when each board has two mini-PCIe ports, which is at 2Gbit/sec, and make a ring topology out of them, or using a PCIe switch. Another interesting approach could have been a usb 3 fabric.
The name is somewhat unlucky as The Orange Box[1] already exists.<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box</a>
Very nice. I like the idea of this "HDK" as the post mentions. It would be useful in case that you want to conduct an experiment and use this HDK as your platform, and provide an easy way for others to fully understand your environment and test your results, eliminating any other factors.
In the same spirit, recently I found LittleFe [1]. I think it is now abandoned (based on the fact the the copyright message is still 2012 and the latest item in news was posted in March 2012), but it seems to be a good project.<p>[1] <a href="http://littlefe.net" rel="nofollow">http://littlefe.net</a>
Is there any estimate of the cost of this unit? This is the sort of thing that would make it very easy to set up and run in an industrial facility. Normally we don't have access to software devs, but could really use a solid hackable platform for process analysis. Having a single unit by a brand name would make requsitioning a system far easier from a Purchasing standpoint.
Is there a similar designed solution that combines say 10 cheaper SOC (raspberry pi's?) and a 100mb network?<p>I would love to play with clustering setups at home, but almost ~$13k USD is way over my hobby budget. My only option currently is really visualization for learning.
Does anyone else wish they had doubled the number of drives and used RAID?<p>10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node<p>It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.
Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box.<p>[1] <a href="https://protonet.info/en/product/" rel="nofollow">https://protonet.info/en/product/</a>
Finally, I always wanted a botnet and spaceheater in one. Sure, this is about 10 times what the actual value is, but no price is too great to pay for Freedom.