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Inventory

Every machine, one record each

Each record below describes one physical computer. Specifications were read from the machine itself; anything not yet recorded is shown as such rather than filled in.

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History

How the cluster changed

Dated events taken from my own operating records.

  1. Inventory re-measured for this site

    Chip, core counts, unified memory, storage and negotiated network link rate were read directly from each machine. Twenty-eight machines answered; one laptop was powered off and keeps its earlier measured record.

  2. External servers consolidated; nodes labelled

    Four hosted bare-metal servers were retired, leaving a single external machine: the public gateway. Every node received a stable number and a printed label with a QR code, visible in the photographs.

  3. M5 and M6 generation machines

    Between 26 and 28 September, a Mac Studio M5 Max, a Mac mini M5 Pro and two Mac mini M6 were added, bringing the inventory to 29 machines.

  4. Off-site rented machines removed

    Twelve rented, off-site Macs that had been attached for about two weeks were removed. Every node is now a machine I own, in one place. A third Mac Studio M4 Max (64 GB) was added the same day.

  5. Three Mac mini machines added

    Two Mac mini M4 Pro (48 GB) and one Mac mini M4 (16 GB) joined the cluster.

  6. Self-hosted public tunnel

    Public websites moved to an encrypted tunnel ending on a hosted bare-metal gateway that terminates TLS. The same day, a power outage restarted sixteen machines; all came back unattended.

  7. Dedicated gateway node and orchestrator

    One Mac Studio became the cluster's entry point: it hosts the private git service and the orchestrator that places each workload on the most suitable node.

  8. Unified LLM endpoint retired

    The always-on public model-serving gateway (MLX-served open-weight models behind an OpenAI-compatible API) was dismantled. Model serving is now started per experiment rather than kept running.

Planned hardware

Not counted in any total

No planned or ordered hardware is documented at the moment. When there is, it will be listed here, separately from the inventory.