Project NEXUS

A private, bare-metal AI/HPC cloud built on two compute planes: a small dedicated Core, and several hundred borrowed DIU classroom PCs.

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Start here

Document	What it answers
ULTIMATE-PLAN.md	What and why. The laws, the physics, the hardware model, the risk register, the acceptance gates, the roadmap.
CAMPUS-FABRIC.md	Plane B — the harvest fabric. How borrowed lab PCs become efficient, consented, measured capacity. Required reading before any *B phase.
ARCHITECTURE.md	How the pieces fit. The eleven-layer stack, component catalog, ADRs, and the Plane A/B layer deltas (§0.4).
phases/README.md	How to build it. The execution protocol, the phase index, and the Beachhead path.

The two planes

                CONTROL PLANE  (3 nodes: etcd · Kueue · Argo CD · Availability Oracle)
                       │
        ┌──────────────┴───────────────┐
        ▼                              ▼
  PLANE A — CORE                 PLANE B — CAMPUS HARVEST
  4–8 dedicated racked nodes     150–400 existing DIU classroom/lab PCs
  25–100 GbE RoCEv2, Ceph        Campus 1 GbE, borrowed outside class hours
  Multi-node training, storage,  Sweeps, batch inference, preprocessing, CI,
  all state, tightly-coupled     single-node training, rendering
  Cost: procurement              Cost: electricity only ($0 capex)

The thesis: the campus already contains more idle compute than the department could afford to buy. The engineering problem is not acquiring capacity — it is harvesting it without waste and without ever inconveniencing a human.

Where to begin building

The Beachhead path (phases/README.md §8) reaches real users in ~8 weeks with zero hardware purchase:

00 → 01 → 01B → 04B → 03B → 06 → 07 → 08B → 09 → 12 → 13 → 15 → 14 → 14B → 25B → 30 → 31B

🚧 Phase 04B is a hard barrier. No campus machine is woken, netbooted, or enrolled before that lab's participation agreement is signed and recorded. See phases/README.md Rule C1.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
phases/	Numbered work orders (00–56 Core, *B Campus)
evidence/	Per-phase proof: preflight, acceptance, handoff, deviations
inventory/	Machine-readable source of truth — nodes, racks, power, network, campus/
clusters/nexus-prod/	GitOps-managed cluster state
docs/	Facility, security, and campus/ documentation
policies/	Kyverno policies and campus/ consent records
tools/	Validation, discovery, and campus/ operational tooling
benchmarks/	Suites, runners, baselines, reports
runbooks/	Operator procedures, one per alert