June 23rd: more servers in the server room, Bazooka Hadoop now available for use
More servers
As part of the reorganisation of the London Mathematical Society's (LMS) web presence, two more servers have been installed in the server room to host parts of the website that are currently hosted on existing servers. In addition, a GPU server fitted with four nVidia GPU cards has been installed for a small research group and another server has been set up for an experimental re-implementation of the acoustics section of the SAFE project.
Bazooka Hadoop cluster now back up
Fresh from a complete rebuild, the Bazooka Hadoop cluster in the Stats section is now back up and running the latest version 6.1 of the MapR Converged Data Platform and at the same time, an additional node called athena was added to the cluster. With 64 processor cores and 512 GB of memory, athena is primarily intended to meet the needs of teaching courses but will be available to research users when not being used for teaching.
Attempts to upgrade the previous MapR version 5.2 to the latest version were only partially successful owing to various changes introduced between the versions so in the end the decision was taken to remove the old installation completely along with all the HDFS user data, install a new MapR 6.1 and then restore around 20 TB of user data back to it which took several days to complete.
During this work, the small Churchill test cluster was used to test various options and configurations prior to their being used on the Bazooka cluster and the old Mortar cluster was also brought out of retirement to aid with this. So there are now 3 Hadoop clusters with the two small Churchill and Mortar clusters available for experimental projects.