Introducing calculus, a new NFS home directory server for research users
Research users and those with high disk space requirements will welcome the news that a departmental NFS home directory server has now been reinstated to complement the ICT NFS server. Based on the former geometry2 hardware, calculus is initially offering 420 Gb of disk space to users of the Maths compute and Stats Linux clusters, where you will find it mounted on /home/calculus. There is an additional 100 Gb of disk space that could be made available on request.
If you want to use data storage on calculus, please contact Andy Thomas to ask for a home directory be set up for you as these are being created upon request. Like the ICNFS server, calculus is strictly a NFS fileserver and you will not be able to log into it or use it for compute work, etc.
Calculus runs FreeBSD 8.2 with support for the ZFS filesystem and when funds become available, an external 14-disk array will be added to create two ZFS disk pools with a capacity of 1.7 Tb each in the same way as been done for the potomac4a-wicomico SCAN server.
Please note that although calculus uses a hardware RAID 5 disk array for data storage, this itself is currently not being backed up either by the ICT backup service or by our own backup systems. This is because our backup library is currently directly attached to silo in the Huxley basement and is unfortunately subject to the limitations of the very slow network there; backups over the network are currently out of the question although there are plans to bring the Huxley level network up to the same gigabit connectivity enjoyed by the rest of the building. On this has been done, calculus will be regularly backed up to tape.