This would be super cool. I don’t know if it would have any actual use in industry. But it would be really neat for people learning MPI/cluster computing. He said, while waiting for a run to go through SLURM.

I've been thinking of doing something with Octavo parts, because my electronic design skills are totally obsolete now and they are simple to integrate. My idea is a board with 16 parts (for 32 cores) with red LEDs lining up one side mimicking a Thinking Machines CM-1 cube. Not a CM-1, but a lot of nodes if you join 16 boards per cube.

Are they selling a service of, like, building a multi-chip package where you pick the chiplets? That seems crazy futuristic.

No. They sell bundled parts where they integrate SoC, memory and passives so that you can just connect power lines, an SD card, and start running it.

Putting that many nontrivial SoCs into a laptop-sized chassis isn't really possible - just look at how busy this single-SoC motherboard already is[0].

It would make far more sense to go the traditional Raspberry Pi cluster way, either as discrete nodes[1], daughterboards[2], or as blades[3].

[0]: https://deepcomputing.io/a-risc-v-world-first-independently-...

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/tutorials/cluster-raspberry-pi-t...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecdm3oA-QdQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6zt8KeXFdA

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKDGlpnP-vE

I was thinking more like this [0] or [1] but laptop.

[0] https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-super6c-raspberry-pi-cm4-...

[1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Clusterboard