Little-Fe is very much a work-in-progress. Each time we use it as part of a workshop, class, etc. we learn more about ways to improve the design and extend its reach to additional educational settings. We are currently working on these items:
- Standardization of motherboard cage design for commercial fabrication.
- Detailed, step-by-step, plans for assembling the hardware and installing the software.
- Gigabit network fabric.
- Head node motherboard with a full set of peripheral connections, 7 compute nodes with just Ethernet. Compute node motherboards can then be cheaper, consume less power, and generate less heat.
- An as yet unrealized design goal was to be able to use Little-Fe with no external power. We originally thought to do this just via a UPS. Currently we are considering solar panels to support truely standalone usage. We are also considering MPI's regenerative braking feature, which is built into some implementations of MPI_Finalize.
- Cheaper/lighter/faster. Moore's law will affect us, as it will all other compute technology. For instance, we hear that in five years we will have a 64 core processor on our desks. It is reasonable that the five-year-in-the-future-Little-Fe will have at least 256 processors, and will be capable of exploring SMP, ccNUMA, and cluster architectures simultaneously. We hope so.
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