//nbkelley /homelab

AI Infrastructure Overview#

What Was Established#

The homelab is transitioning into a multi-node agentic architecture, utilizing a mix of existing laptops, desktops, and a future Mac Studio to handle different tiers of LLM workloads (Batch vs. Interactive).

Key Decisions#

Nodes are specialized by their hardware capabilities (VRAM and CPU/RAM) to optimize for cost and performance:

  • Inference Node (Batch/Heavy + Embeddings): HP Pavilion 15t-e300 — hostname nk-celebrimbor, IP 192.168.2.192. Intel i7, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA MX550 (2GB VRAM, CUDA disabled). Runs gemma4:e4b for monitoring pipeline synthesis (~15-18 t/s, CPU-only) and nomic-embed-text for wiki semantic embeddings (768-dim, via Ollama on port 11434).
  • Orchestrator Node: Thinkpad T480. Intel i5/i7 8th Gen, 32GB RAM. Running headless Ubuntu. Hosts n8n and lightweight models (Gemma 4 E4B) for routing and decision-making.
  • Interactive Node (Potential): ROG Zephyrus (GU501). Intel i7, NVIDIA GTX 1080 Max-Q (8GB VRAM). Ideal for 7B/8B models requiring high tokens-per-second for real-time chat.
  • Primary Reasoning Node (Deployed 2026-04-24): Mac Studio M1 Max, 64GB Unified Memory — hostname Legolas, IP 192.168.1.45. Handles all wiki pipeline LLM calls: gemma4:e2b (text cleaning), qwen3.6:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4 (JSON crystallization), minicpm-v:8b (PDF OCR/vision). Fast interactive inference — 31B models at ~25+ t/s vs Pavilion’s ~15 t/s CPU-only. See Mac Studio.
  • Parallelism Nodes: Various i5 8th Gen desktops. 32GB RAM, no GPU. Used for distributed pipeline stages or additional lightweight model instances.

Current Configuration#

  • Legolas (Mac Studio): Ollama at 192.168.1.45:11434. Running gemma4:e2b, qwen3.6:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4, minicpm-v:8b for wiki pipeline. Deployed 2026-04-24.
  • nk-celebrimbor (Pavilion): headless Ubuntu, Ollama CPU-only (CUDA disabled — MX550 2GB VRAM too small). Running gemma4:e4b at ~15-18 t/s for hourly monitoring pipeline; nomic-embed-text for wiki embeddings.
  • T480: planned orchestrator role not yet active.

Ollama Configuration, Open WebUI Deployment, Mac Studio, Pavilion (AI PC) Configuration

Sources#

Homelab AI - 2026-04-13 · ingested/chats/Homelab AI - 2026-04-13

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