The "Captain Howdy" Project

[fu11m00n]

IMHO... To me AI is just a glorified bowl of water... or crystal ball... or tarot (or even Ouija).

See... Scrying

The human thirst for knowledge is sometimes insatiable (and sometimes to a fault).
But still as they say... "curiosity killed the cat" ("and satisfaction brought him back"?).

AI (eg... Anthropic/Claude) has opened up a literal Pandora's box. SkyNet anyone?

This new toy is whimsical but from my time using it... unpredictable.
In any case... as they say "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" (or is it... "if you can't beat them then join them"?).

To that end... that's right, I'm jumping on the bandwagon too. LOL.

This new hardware project is a heavy lift because although the easy part (@ least for me)
is building it... the real challenge is cobbling together a OS to run on it.

Porteus to date does not have a functional ARM derivative (I'm still working my way through that rabbit hole).

With that said, here we go...

Already I have... 2 DeskPi mITX mainboards with a 1u server case and 2 RaspberryPi CM4 SoC's on order.

And finally to top it off an Nvidia Jetson Nano to serve as the frontend (all work and no play?... dude it's great for gaming).
When this hardware project is finished we're talking a... 2 node... 14 processor... 56 thread Beowulf server.

See... Beowulf cluster

So now for the real challenge. That would be creating a functional Porteus ARM derivative.
For that I'm getting some guidance from Stuart Winter (Slackware for Arm).

To do this I will have to abandon the use of 3rd party packages to use Stuart's creation.
The OS build has to be 100% Slackware upstream compatible for this project to be feasible.

To avoid compiling (for now) I'm collating Stuart's packages into layered modules.

...to be continued.

[fu11m00n]

I'm making a small pivot. I'm dropping the Minnowboard and one DeskPi and I'm adding Raxda's Orion v06.

[fu11m00n]

Yet another pivot. Dropping the Jetson Nano.
Dropping the dual DeskPi (single only). The Orion v06 is out of stock.
So I will pivot to the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 Developer Kit (6 ARM cores 8gb).
That gives me... 2 nodes... 10 processors and 30 cores in a 1u case.
Not bad. With still room for 1 credit card size SBC and one hybrid drive.

[fu11m00n]

Pivot again... 2 DeskPi's + CanMV K230 (vector RISC) + Beaglebone "black" (Minix 3) for the DMZ.

[fu11m00n]

On the AI software front I'm looking into 1 bit (tiny) LLM's.

[fu11m00n]

Final pivot.. 2 DeskPi's + 2 CanMV's (waiting for delivery).

[fu11m00n]

"Captain Howdy"...