[Beowulf] Article on Sanger centre

[Guy Coates]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Mark Hahn wrote:

> > Slashdot is carrying an article on the infrastructure at the Sanger
> > Centre.
>
> http://www.primidi.com/2005/06/06.html
>
> > Goodness - still running many Alpha processors.
>
> hey!  what's wrong with alphas?
>
> I was rather surprised that they've left it until now to consider replacing
> the alphas, though.

Ahh, the joys of press miss-reporting; we don't have that much alpha, I
have no idea where that number came from. Our compute clusters are various
generations of Pentium and emt64/opteron.

The alpha is left is mostly on infrastructure type machines (database/file
servers) where there is a high-availiability requirement. Those machine
run Tru64 Trucluster (VMS like clustering). We are in the process of
moving that to Linux, but it is not a simple migration. We've got lots of
legacy software that assumes clustered IP addresses and filesystems.

> > Might be worth reversing the car up to the loading bay the day they
> > are got rid of....

We've got a 32 CPU GS320 with 192 GB of memory waiting to go to a good
home (you have 3 phase at home, right :).

Guy

-- 
Dr. Guy Coates,  Informatics System Group
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1HH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 834244 x 6925
Fax: +44 (0)1223 494919