August 14th: more servers for Stats, remote monitoring upgrades, better system status reporting and more power supplies
More servers for Stats
Two new servers, apollo and artemis, have joined the Stats Linux computing group specifiucally for MSc project use. Running the latets Ubuntu 18.04 Linux, these each have 192 GB of memory and two hex-core CPUs. Also, the StatML CDT now has its own dedicated webserver.
Remote monitoring and status reporting
Much of June and July has been spent working on relatively minor projects and meeting demands from researchers, visitors and UROP students but time has been found to significantly enhance remote monitoring and alerting as well as providing suers with more information about what it going on in the research IT infrastructure. The sysmon website now allows you to check at a glance the status of systems and the reasons for any system that is down or not completely functional; a new feature has been the load averages display pagess, sorted by decreasing loads and by hostname in alphabetical order. You may be shocked to see the compute loads on some of these systems, which are usually those belonging to research sections or small groups, but rest assured the main departmental clusters are fully managed where this situation does not usually occur.
More power supplies
To keep up with the continual increase in the number of systems hosted in the Maths server room, we have to provide an increasing amount of reliable electrical power so we have taken delivery of another 8 kVA UPS and we are awaiting installation of two more 32amp power feeds in the room.