160 Mac Mini in one server rack

Probably, if an engineer sees a small computer, then he immediately has an idea to take a hundred or two such babies - and merge them into a cluster. This impression is created when you see projects like a cluster of 64 Raspberry Pi computers . But this is nothing compared to the self-made design of the 160 Mac Mini , which is already installed and running in one of the data centers.

A year ago, Apple curtailed the production of the Xserve servers at 1U, but a holy place is never empty, and fans of Apple technology began to make home-made designs with maximum processor density in the rack. It turns out that with standard hands you can put one hundred and sixty Mac Mini Servers in a standard server cabinet - small, quiet desktops with four-core Core i7 processors, generally designed for home use.

It turns out that the Mac Mini works great together if you build plastic stands for compact placement in the cabinet for them and add enhanced cooling to the door. With this cooling, the CPU temperature is around 30 ° C. For comparison, without fans they heat up to 99 ° C, the difference is significant.

The 160 Mac Mini is quite a budget cluster with 640 processor cores with relatively low power consumption <30A (along with fans). Each Mac Mini has 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB SSDs.
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The author of the project in his blog describes the stages of work and problems that had to be solved. In addition to cooling and the size of the unit, it is also laying cables. Each unit has a power cable and an Ethernet cable. The problem with the power cables was solved by 4-in-1 cables, see the last photo.