bladerunner/docs/intro.rst

Introduction
============

I'm working on building a cluster of Raspberry Pi CM4 compute blades. I plan on
using the cluster to learn a bunch of stuff, but I need to be able to provision
the blades automatically. This repo is my work in that area.

There are some assumptions made:

1. All the systems involved are Debian-ish systems, particularly Ubuntu. The
   build system here will assume this. It may work on non-Ubuntu apt-based
   systems. For non-Debian systems, I've also been working on including
   container builds that may work.
2. The primary target for this setup is Ubuntu 22.04. This needs to be 
   validated still.

There are three physical types of systems:

- ``dev`` indicates DEV compute blades.
- ``tpm`` indicates TPM compute blades.
- ``adm`` indicates an admin system, which will likely be a CM4 carrier board
  in non-blade form. I foresee two types of systems: ``adm`` runs administrative
  services (such as a PXE boot server) and ``gw`` managing networking with the
  outside world.

The `computeblade docs <https://docs.computeblade.com/>`_ has a description of
the different blade types.

Below is a diagram of the planned system.

.. graphviz ::

    digraph cluster {
        subgraph {
            dev01;
            dev02;
            dev03;
            dev04;
            dev05;

            tpm01;
            tpm02;
            tpm03;
            tpm04;
            tpm05;
        }

        "poe-switch" -> dev01 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> dev02 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> dev03 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> dev04 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> dev05 [dir=both];

        "poe-switch" -> tpm01 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> tpm02 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> tpm03 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> tpm04 [dir=both];
        "poe-switch" -> tpm05 [dir=both];

        "poe-switch" -> gw [dir=both];
        publicnet    -> gw [dir=both];
    }


Hardware
--------

The hardware isn't slated to arrive until September at the earliest. I am
leaning towards having the 1TB NVMe drives go with the AI modules, and use
the gateway system as the storage machine if needed.

+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| Item                       | Quantity | Notes                                  |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| TPM blade                  | 5        | TPM 2.0                                |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| DEV blade                  | 6        | TPM 2.0, µSD, nRPIBOOT                 |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| CM4                        | 10       | 8GB RAM, no eMMC/WiFi/BT               |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| CM4                        | 2        | 8 GB RAM, eMMC/WiFi/BT (gw, dev blade) |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus 500GB | 4/7      | 2280                                   |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus 1 TB  | 2/4      | 2280 (1 allocated to gw)               |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| RTC module                 | 10       | DS3231                                 |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| AI module                  | 3        | 2x Coral TPU                           |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| CM4 carrier board          | 1        | Dual-homed, NVMe slot, Zymbit 4i       |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+
| Netgear GS316PP            | 1        | 16-port PoE+ (183W)                    |
+----------------------------+----------+----------------------------------------+

Logical roles
-------------

Aside from the physical hardware types, there are essentially ``cluster`` nodes
and ``meta`` nodes. The ``cluster`` nodes are the compute blades, and ``meta``
are any additional systems involved. Individual nodes might be tagged with roles
as well to indicate additional capabilities, such as ``ai`` for ``cluster`` nodes
with TPUs or ``storage`` for ``cluster`` nodes with additional (e.g. 1TB) storage.