Building a Parallel Pi (2)

I've been spending a good deal of time lately thinking about an optimal physical configuration for an 8 slice Pi bramble.  Professor Cox's Lego setup is a very good one, but my concern is the way the cables tend to twist and lift the card  up in the air.  Whatever platform I mount the Pi cards to has to have enough weight to keep everything in place.

Professor Cox has 64 nodes arranged into 16 planes/blades, grouped into 2 sets of 8.  I think stacking things this high gives these configurations enough heft to stay put.  However, I'm only going to have 2 planes of 4 Pis each, and with 2 cables (CAT5, power) per card, I think a Lego board underneath will be a little too light for things to be stable.

I think I'm going to use an 18' X 12' nylon cutting board to mount each Pi, 4 to a board.  I'll then stack 2 of these, and probably put a plexiglass top over it all to make things easy to see.  I've been collecting all of the parts for this, but before I can get serious about assembling things, I need a work space.  The living room isn't a good place to do this.

Here is what things look like now:

The wire frame shelves make a good Pi rack, because it's easy to thread cables and cords between the shelves.

I went with a wireless keyboard to eliminate a USB cord, and make the configuration a little less cluttered.

The next step is to begin mounting and cabling everything up.  That is going to be an interesting challenge.