Intel NUCs make a perfect home cluster

Getting my latest NUC

I am pretty psyched to get my latest Intel NUC.  The NUC7i7DNKE has an 8th generation Intel® Core™ i7 vPro™ 4.2 GHz “Turbo”, quad core processor with 32GB of DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and a 1TGB SSD drive.  Not to mention built in 4K UHD video with HDMI ports and USB 3.0.

I will use this as my main development machine.  It is crazy that I tend to run out of RAM on my 16GB machines running Ubuntu.

This will be my 9th NUC.  Maybe I am a little too in love with these things.  They make great clusters for home research and development on distributed technologies such as Cassandra and Hadoop.  I have three nodes running Cassandra and Hadoop today – and am looking to add a 4th node when I free up my current development machine NUC.

Quiet, Low Power, great for clustering!

They are whisper quiet and use very low power.  There are 5 in a stack sitting on my desk next to me as I write this, and they make less noise than a single standard PC.  In fact, they seem to make no noise at all.

I also run Windows 10 on one as a home theater type of PC connected to a Samsung UHD TV via HDMI.  These NUCs are awesome.  I gave my old i3 core media NUC to my younger brother as a gift.

Here is an old picture of my early stack of NUCs.  They are each 4″ x 4″.

Ted Cahall

Author: Ted Cahall

Ted Cahall is an executive, engineer, entrepreneur as well as amateur race car driver. He combined his skills as an engineer and passion for racing by developing the marrspoints.com points tracking website for the Washington DC region of the SCCA. View all posts by Ted Cahall