Little-Fe v1 consisted of eight Travla mini-ITX VIA computers placed in a nearly indestructible Pelican case. To use it you took all the nodes, networking gear, power supplies, etc. out of the case and set it up on a table. Each node was a complete computer with its own hard drive. While this design met the portability, cost, and low power design goals, it was overweight and deployment was both time-consuming and error-prone.
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| Version 1 of Little-Fe at SIAM's Computational Science and Engineering conference in February, 2005 |
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| Paul Gray is driving while we prepare for our presentation |
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Successive versions of Little-Fe have moved to a physical architecture where the compute nodes are bare Mini-ITX motherboards mounted in a custom designed cage, which in turn is housed in the Pelican case. To accomplish this we stripped the Travla nodes down, using only their motherboards, replaced their relatively large power supplies with daughter board style units which mount directly to the motherboard's ATX power connector. These changes saved both space and weight. Little-Fe v2 and beyond use diskless compute nodes, that is only the head node has a disk drive. The mechanics of this setup are described in the software section of this article. Removing 7 disk drives from the system reduced power consumption considerably and further reduced the weight and packaging complexity.
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| Version 12 of Little-Fe at a week long Parallel Programming Workshop at Oklahoma University's Supercomputer Center for Education and Research in August, 2005 |
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| In all three pictures you can see the Pelican case which contains Little Fe. The second version was much lighter and simpler, but we were still working on cooling. The wooden cage solved problems getting through airline security with breakage as well as greatly simplifying set-up. |
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| Just after these pictures were taken, we moved Little-Fe to the conferenmce room one of the on-board power supply chips zorched with a small amount of flame and smoke. Note: Charlie Peck is a volunteer fireman an I take his word that zorch is the appropriate technical term. |
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The current hardware manifest consists of:
- 8 - Via EPIA-M motherboards
- 1 - PW200-M power supply for head node
- 7 - PW70 power supplies for compute nodes
- 1 - SE-600-12 100VAC-12VDC switching power supply
- 10 - CAT-5 Ethernet cables; 1@250mm, 4@350mm, 4@500mm, 1@3m
- 2 - 40GB 5200RPM laptop form-factor disk drive (one for the head node, one for backup)
- 1 - CD-RW/DVD drive
- 1 - 10 port 100MB Ethernet switch
- 1 - custom motherboard cage
- 1 - Pelican 1660 Case
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