My shipment of ODROID XU4s that I ordered for my low cost cluster came into today. So I set out to assemble the cluster. My daughter “helped” me with this, making it a fun family activity. First thing I did was layout the nodes. Though I knew these board would be small, it did impress me just how small they were. The first task is to attach the eMMC drive to each node. Note that I eventually had to undo this as I later discovered I needed to flash the drives with the latest Ubuntu build. But given the amount of space the PCB standoffs five, removing and reattaching the eMMC drive is not hard. Then I attached the XU4s together with the PCB standoffs I bought. The short standoffs are for the “feet” to the stack, and the long ones to separate each node. Once I stacked all of the nodes, I attached the ethernet switch and the cabling. I Read More …