Chuck Polisher gave a talk about his home grown 'hive' cluster.
It is about 3 foot high round and full of computer parts . It is about the same size as a coffee table or a trash can or R2D2 without skin. Someone even said it looked like part of the staging engine of a rocket.

<Andy's paraphrase, with apologies to Chuck>
Chuck started talking about doing simulations and tanks(?). (He has a big idea, so we will forgive the sidestepping). He built a 8 node cluster around a large pvc pipe with glue and inspiration. He wants to use his cluster in a unique way. His idea is to have multiple OS running on each node. a few linux's, a few bsd's and even dos. It was fascinating listening to him go on about the complexities of simulations and parallelizing computing tasks. He did a remarkable job putting all this together for under $600.00. (And he has enough stuff to build 2.5 more 'hives')
</end paraphrase>

Among the most notable quotes:
"Distributions are your friend."
"When I start again, I will use a mini-distro."
"strace is a greate utility. It's like opening up the patient and saying what hurts."