Dan Garfield

I've been trying to do a "December thus far" update but December is going to eat me alive so I'll just post what I have. Here is a picture dump of our last few weeks. Seriously if I make it to January alive I'll be very surprised.  Ward Christmas party. Eli decided he wanted to spontaneously join in with Jr primary in being a lamb in the program. He was mostly into it...for about ten seconds. Then he was on the lamb....ha!  Sammy is awesome. In the last few weeks I have noticed how much he is starting to really respond to his surroundings and that is scary. He wants to be like Eli so so bad. That is also scary, but in an endearing sort of way. 
 We made a ginger-bread candy train one night. I spent most of the time getting after Eli for chowing copious amounts of candy. I gave up in the end and we jabbed each other with frosting for a bit. It was a good time.   My big boy. 
 Eating and ice-cream, eating Teddy Grahams. He eats. A lot. 
He's way into self feeding...but not always in the most effective ways. 

[Steve] needed an alternative to the Xserve, since Apple stopped making it. His solution was to stick 160 Mac Minis into a rack. That’s 640 real cores, or 1280 if you count HyperThreading.

First, Steve had to tackle the shelving. Nobody made a 1U shelf to hold four Minis, so [Steve] worked with a vendor to design his own. Once challenge of this was managing the exaust air of each Mini. Plastic inserts were designed to ensure that exaust wasn’t sucked into the intake of an adjancent Mini.

An array of 160 computers is going to throw a lot of heat. To provide sufficient airflow, [Steve] built a custom cooling door out of four car radiators fans, connected to a 40A DC motor controller. This was all integrated into the door of the rack.

Another challenge was getting power to all of the Minis. Since this deisgn was for a data center, the Minis would have to draw power from a Power Distribution Unit (PDU). This would have required a lot of PDUs, and a lot of cables. The solution: a one to four Y cable for the Minis. This allows each shelf of four to plug into a single outlet.

The final result is a professional looking rack that can replace a rack of Xserves, and has capacity to be upgraded in the future.

Filed under: macs hacks