1. Mounting the power supplies to the motherboards
2. Installing the motherboards in the cage
3. Mounting the system power supply to the cage
4. Cabling the power supplies
5. Mounting the Ethernet switch and installing the network cabling
6. Mounting the disk drive and CD-RW/DVD drive to the cage and installing the power and data cables
7. Installing the cooling fans in the cage
8. Plugging in the monitor, keyboard, and mouse
9. Performing the initial power-up tests
10. Configuring the BIOS on each motherboard to boot via the LAN and PXE

Cooling Little-Fe has been an on-going challenge which we have just recently begun to master. The problem hasn't been the total amount of heat generated, but rather airflow to particular locations on the motherboards during compute intensive loads. By re-using the 25mm fans which came with the Travla cases we have been able to improve inter-board cooling within the motherboard cage. The importance of testing heat dissipation during a variety of system loads became painfully clear to us during a National Computational Science Institute (http://www.computationalscience.org) (NCSI) Parallel Computing Workshop at the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research (http://www.oscer.ou.edu) (OSCER) in August, 2005. After a presentation on Little-Fe we left it running a POV ray tracing run that was particularly large. Not 10 minutes later there was a dramatic "pop" and a small puff of smoke as one of voltage regulators on one of the motherboards went up-in-smoke. Fortunately Little-Fe can adapt easily to a 7, or fewer, node architecture.

For transportation the cage simply sits inside the Pelican case. The base of the cage is sized so that it fits snugly in the bottom of the case, this prevents Little-Fe from moving around inside the box. The addition of a single layer of foam padding on each of the six sides further cushions Little-Fe.