Went with an older generation of NUC to keep the cost of the project low. With the low cost of SSD's, I decided to go with two drives on these computers with the 1TB SATA drives being used for a distributed filesystem. The Intel NUC7i5BNH has a 4-core i5 processor which provides 8GB per core, which provides sufficient memory for the application which I am trying to use. For HPC application, the amount of memory per node becomes critical for application performance. Putting more than 32GB of RAM in the mini-PC platforms becomes cost prohibitive.
Intel NUC7i5BNH
32 GB RAM
/dev/nvme0n1 - 1 TB NVMe SSD
/dev/sda - 1 TB SATA SSD
Installation of Ubuntu 20.4.2 LTS Server is pretty straight forward. The operating system is installed onto /dev/nvme0n1 and NOT using LVM. The plan is to use /dev/sda as the disk for a distributed file system.
3. Network setup. All NUC nodes are setup with static IP addresses:
a. hostname change
sudo vi /etc/hostname
sudo vi /etc/netplan/99-config.yaml
the file should be modified to something like:
network:
version: 2
renderer: networkd
ethernets:
eth0:
addresses:
- 10.0.0.20/24
gateway4: 10.0.0.1
nameservers:
addresses: [1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1]