Hardware

Two reference builds for the switchboard.

What is documented here

Wirken runs on commodity hardware. The two configurations below are reference builds for operators who want a hardware-side answer to "what should I run wirken on?" Neither is a product line. Both are bills of materials a competent integrator can match component-for-component.

Fern is the small dedicated box for one agent, reaching the LLM remotely. Heim adds enough local GPU to run inference and research aggregation on the same machine.

Fern

Fern hosts the switchboard, the adapters, the audit log, and the WebChat surface, and reaches the LLM over TLS. The local box never holds inference weights. Fern fits the confidential-inference posture cleanly: the only outbound inference connection is an attested HTTPS path, which can be pinned at the network layer. It fits in your hand and has 10 Gigabit Ethernet, so adapter handshakes with channel platforms add no measurable latency to a turn.

SystemBeelink SER10 MAX
CPURyzen AI 9 HX 470
GPURadeon 890M integrated
RAM32 GB DDR5-5600
Storage1 TB NVMe
Network10 GbE, Wi-Fi 6
Wirken Fern reference build
Fern reference build. Beelink SER10 MAX chassis with integrated graphics; no discrete GPU.

Heim

Heim is the aggregation box. It carries enough local GPU to host inference, embedding generation, and the librarian side of Zirkel, wirken's research aggregator, on the same machine. The workstation-class NVIDIA GPU brings 32 GB of ECC GDDR7, which is enough headroom for the embedding and retrieval workloads Zirkel runs across a serious corpus. RAM is doubled. The case and PSU are sized for sustained compute under load rather than burst, so a long retrieval pass does not throttle or spin up unpleasantly. Storage is large enough to retain a meaningful corpus and several months of audit log alongside it.

CaseFractal Design Terra
CPURyzen 9 9900X
CPU Cooler70mm low-profile AM5, 120mm fan
MotherboardAM5 Mini-ITX, B650E, Wi-Fi 6E
RAM64 GB DDR5-6000 (2× 32 GB)
Storage4 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0+
GPUNVIDIA RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell 32 GB ECC GDDR7
PSU850W SFX-L Platinum
Wirken Heim reference build
Heim reference build. Fractal Design Terra mini-ITX chassis with workstation-class discrete GPU.

How to use this page

These are bills of materials. Source the parts and build the box, or hand the list to an integrator who will. The wirken binary does not know the difference between a reference build and a comparable machine you assembled yourself; it asks the OS for a vault key, a Unix domain socket, and a network interface, and Fern and Heim both provide those the same way as any other Linux or macOS host. If you have a stricter security target than these references aim at, the components that matter to a wirken deployment are the same components a hardened workstation already gets right: full-disk encryption, a real TPM, secure boot, and an OS keychain you trust to hold the vault key.