Quick summary: new server room power supplies, more compute nodes and new home directory servers
Having reached the end of the summer vacation, here's an update on Maths research computing news:
New server room power supplies: the Huxley/Blackett electrical risers project has finally been completed and the Maths server room is no longer on a temporary power supply. Following on from the riser project, an additional project to provide dual power power supplies to the Maths server server room was completed on Monday September 14th. This provides two separate incoming supplies for redundancy along with an automatic transfer switch; normally both supplies are available but if one should fail, the switch will automatically switch over to the other supply to maintain power to the server room.
Eventually the cooling systems will also be fed from this dual power supply although at present they are still on a temporary supply.
more compute nodes: the HP C7000 blade enclosure accommodating the 10 blade servers mablad01-10 inclusive in the Maths compute cluster can contain up to 16 server blades but owing to the cost of these blades, only 10 were fitted originally and there have been 6 empty slots. In July, 6 second-hand server blades were purchased and these emply slots have been filled with mablad11-16. These are identical to the original mablad01-10 blades but have faster (albeit a little smaller) system disks; currently these new blades do not have scratch disks fitted - these will be added at a later date.
new home cluster directory servers: a new dedicated home directory server was added to the Maths compute cluster in August to provide much more storage with faster read/write access than is provided by ICNFS. This server is appropriately named clustor and is backed up the identical clustor-backup server.More details...