02 Nov, 2011A Small Mac Mini Server Cluster

I have recently been building a small multi-node cluster of Mac Mini Servers as a development tool to explore some cloud services and parallel processing techniques. For this purpose, the Mac Mini is great as they are dead quiet, use very little power, boot with no problems without a keyboard, mouse or monitor attached and are easily set up to allow full remote management, configuration and screen sharing. For me the Server version is best as only they come with an Intel quad-core i7 CPU, giving effectively 8 processing nodes each. The CPU speed is a bit slower compared to the best non-server version (2.0MHz vs 2.7MHz), however the non-server version is only dual-core.