HP Starlight

Projects
Participants
Skills	Mechanics, Electrical engineering, Reverse engineering, IT
Status	Planning
Niche	Electronics
Purpose	World domination

An plan to reverse engineer the backplane of the HPe Moonshot system to build cheap, tiny and powerfull servers, vdi workstations or clusters.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, HPe introduced the Moonshot system. This is a system that uses a backplane with a lot of connectors to which you can plug in modules. These modules are small servers with a low power consumption. The idea is that you can build a server with a lot of small modules, each with their own CPU, memory and storage. This way you can build a server with a lot of CPU cores and a lot of memory, but with a low power consumption. The modules are also very small, so you can fit a lot of them in a small space.

Initial Moonshot system

The initial Moonshot system used a single 4.3U rack mounted chassis that could contain 45 small moonshot cartridges with a couple of different types of modules. The modules were connected to the backplane with a proprietary connector. The backplane also contained a switch to connect the modules to the network. The modules were available with different types of CPU's, memory and storage.

• 
  HPe moonshot 1500 system

Edgeline range

The edgeline range of systems were used for edge-computing like single terminals or small VDI clusters.

• 
  HP Edgeline EL4000 Rackmounted quad node system
• 
  Edgeline EL1000 single node system

Plan

The overall effort will be divided into two versions of the project. The first version will be a relatively simple board that you can use to plug in a single module and use it as a stand-alone workstation/server. The second one will be a version with 4 or more modules on a baseboard to make a small cluster of moonshot modules with all required I/O broken out.

Projects:

• Orbital Starlight
• Interstellar Starlight

Orbital Starlight

this project will be the first exploration in getting the HP Moonshot modules working as standalone computers for use as either a compact workstation or small home-server.

Interstellar Starlight

this project will be the second exploration in getting the HP Moonshot modules working as a small cluster of computers for use as either VDI infrastructure or as a compute cluster.