The Homebrew HPC Project

Bringing Enterprise Supercomputing to the Home Lab

What We're Building

We are building a fully functional, bare-metal High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster out of recycled, small and ultra-small form factor enterprise desktops.

This isn't just a pile of computers running basic home automation. We are deploying the exact same software ecosystem used by Top500 supercomputers—scaled down to fit a home lab footprint and budget.

The Open Source Stack

The entire infrastructure relies strictly on community-driven, production-grade open source projects:

AlmaLinux 9
Warewulf v4
SLURM
Ceph Storage
SlurmDash
Open OnDemand
LLDAP
Grafana
Prometheus
ntfy.sh

By using Warewulf, our compute nodes boot statelessly over the network into an AlmaLinux 9 environment. Storage is handled entirely by a hyperconverged Ceph pool, and job orchestration is governed securely by SLURM. For users, SlurmDash and Open OnDemand provide sleek, modern web interfaces to submit jobs and monitor the execution queues in real-time.

Why We're Doing It

Enterprise engineering principles shouldn't be locked behind massive corporate budgets. The purpose of this cluster is to build an active playground for testing parallel workflows, cluster management, and distributed systems architecture.

Once deployment stability is reached, the long-term roadmap includes spinning up our public-facing portals to allow local tech enthusiasts, students, and researchers to log in, write scripts, and submit jobs to a genuine execution queue.

How You Can Help

Assembling an entire cluster on a strict budget takes a village. If you want to see this ecosystem grow, we are explicitly looking for:

  • Hardware Donations Have old corporate or lab hardware gathering dust? We are hunting for Small Form Factor (SFF) desktops (such as HP EliteDesk 800 G2 or Dell OptiPlex 7040 lines) with 6th Gen Core i5 processors or newer and strictly 16GB of RAM. We also accept standalone SATA/NVMe SSDs to expand the Ceph storage tier.
  • Project Funding Want to help offset power costs or contribute directly to the next batch of nodes acquired from liquidators? Every contribution keeps the fans spinning and the terminal lines moving.

Follow the Progress & Get in Touch

Whether you want to coordinate a hardware drop-off, talk infrastructure, or monitor the cluster logs along with us, let's connect.