A new compute cluster located in the ICT data centre has now been set up to replace the existing Maths German Cities compute farm, which is located in the basement of the Huxley building. Known as the Fünf cluster, the Germanic naming convention, originally introduced by Dr Robert Nürnberg in 2001, continues and reflects the five systems in the cluster. Each system contains two 3 Ghz quad-core Intel Xeon 64-bit CPUs with 12 MB of level 2 cache, 16 GBytes of memory and 2 GBytes of swap space. The machines have been named after German mathematicians as:
dirichlet
euler
gauss
leibniz
riemann
(These systems are also known to ICT as ma-compute-01 to ma-compute-05 respectively but these human-friendly names will be more memorable and are less likely to lead to confusion).
All of these systems run 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and apart from having more recent 64-bit versions of installed packages, they are set up in the same way as the existing 32-bit German Cities farm and access the same Maths-specific applications on the Maths Linux applications servers.
You can find out more about the new cluster and check the loading status of the machines in the new cluster now - data for the old Pentium3 and Pentium 4 (German Cities) farms will continue to be available until these facilities are retired within the next few weeks.
Retirement of the German Cities compute farm
With the introduction of the Fünf compute cluster, the German Cities farm will be retired and disposed of. No new logins - and hence no new jobs - will be allowed from Saturday, October 18th although existing jobs will be allowed to run to completion. Once all jobs on any given node in this farm have terminated, the system will be shut down and powered off. Please use the new Fünf cluster for all your future jobs.
Let me know if you have any problems with either the new facility or the closure of the existing facility and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.