The first Enzian single board is working!

We are delighted to announce that the first single-board Enzian machine is working! Here is a picture of the first working board:

This is fully populated, with 640GiB of DDR4 RAM. It boots to Linux. You can read the full specification of the system here

Right now, it’s the only one, but the next 9 are in final testing. After that, we’re looking at options for building more.

We’re excited about lots of research topics using Enzian as a platform, but we’re also keen to work with collaborators who have cool ideas to try out using the platform.

We’re also very interested in talking with companies about funding opportunities for collaborative research using Enzian. Please get in touch!

It’s been a long and wild adventure, culminating in the difficult process of software and firmware bringup on an hugely complicated board under COVID lockdown conditions. The team has been amazing, and we’re all looking forward to working with the platform.

We’ve also learned a lot from the process of actually building a new computer - we had never done this before. Very little of this will come as a surprise to people who design server boards for a living. However, to a systems software research group like ourselves it is very different from what the textbooks say, and it has changed our perpective on what modern computer systems are really like. This has kicked off a number of research directions in our group which we hope to write up soon.