I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.
replyTheir engineered power and cooling solutions are all for rack-scaled hardware, doing a NUC wouldn't make sense. Now a silent and efficiently cooled studio-sized rack with enough hardware (including AMD GPUs) for reasonably quick AI inference with the latest local models, that's something that they could do and be quite popular.
replyFramework desktop mainboards 128GB version. They even show a mini rack with 4 of them.
replyThat's mini ITX hardware, not really rack-sized in the sense of a common studio rack.
replyI'm not saying they should put their software stack on a Celeron (or whatever Intel calls their cheap CPUs now). But no racks, please. I just can't get with the "rack in my house" crowd. If you have a basement, then fine I guess. But I live in an apartment, and I don't have the space or patience for a computer that's the size of a mini fridge, and sounds like a jet engine.
replyAll of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.
replyStep 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.
I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a homelab user?
replyMany homelab users are actually building things out in an effort to learn tooling that they will then use at work. Or just out of intellectual interest.
replyYeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.
replyIf they can scale down the hardware to something close to homelab-ish in price, would be great marketing and way to build expertise to have their big boy solution promoted at workplaces. Probably not a priority at their stage though.
replyPrices start around 800k last time I heard, I don't know if that fits within what you consider a premium or not :-)
replyHah, that might be slightly above what I'm ready to pay for a at-home server yes :) But given the right specifications and software integration, I'd probably be ready to pony up up to somewhere around 10K for a complete solution if it could replace all my existing hardware, even if it was more expensive than other options with worse tradeoffs.
replyYou would need 3-phase power too. At 208V and 15kW it'll draw over 70A peak :P. If you can wire that up in your living room, I raise my glass to you!
replyI'll take the challenge if it gets me Oxide hardware!
replyYou can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual networking with x86_64 "sleds."
replyCan you clarify what parts of the Oxide stack you're running? Is it the entire control plane?
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