The Cluster Nobody Asked For

Brokentooth is a collection of computers with distinct jobs, rather than one machine expected to handle every experiment and service at once.

The hardware is a mixture of workstations, office desktops and laptops. Calling it a cluster is convenient. It does not make the parts identical, the capacity unlimited or the administration someone else's responsibility.

Different machines, different constraints

Titan supplies the larger local GPU: an RTX 3090 with 24 GB of VRAM. Sleeper handles development context and agent coordination. Weakling takes on hosting and relay work. Sisyphus has been assigned speech synthesis within the tighter power budget of an office tower.

The portable side has been changing too. Hannibal, a Dell Latitude, is taking over the role previously held by the ThinkPad named Pyrrhus. The individual machine pages keep the dated specifications and transition notes in one place.

A small hardware change can affect more than one box. Memory moved from Titan to expand Weakling is one example. The useful question is not always which computer can be made fastest; sometimes it is which arrangement leaves the whole setup better able to do its jobs.

The unglamorous part counts

Local compute gives me control over where work runs. It also leaves storage limits, service recovery, updates and deployment discipline firmly on my side of the arrangement.

Those are part of the project, not an administrative footnote to it. An impressive experiment is considerably less useful if I cannot tell which process is running it, what state it depends on or how to get back to a working version.

This overview describes roles from the October 2026 notes. It is not live monitoring, a precise fleet-wide capacity total or a guarantee that any named node is available right now.