Installation of the latest version of Matlab R2018b began on the compute cluster on December 13th but with so many Matlab jobs already running - some of which have been running for months - progress with this upgrade is very slow since upgrades have to be done piecemeal when a node is not running a Matlab job. So there is currently no guarantee which version your Matlab job will run under on the cluster. On the other hand, upgrading Matlab on non-clustered systems is considerably easier and is expected to be completed soon.
December 8th: Stats compute facilities upgrade completed
December 7th: silo4 introduced
Identical to silo1 and its backup mirror, silo1-backup, silo4 and the matching silo4-backup mirror servers have been brought into service to provide an additional ~10 TB of user storage and are available for use now. Documentation on the silos can be found here.
November 23rd: completion of new power distribution scheme for shelving area in the server room
A larger PDU has been installed on the bay shelving system for the "always on" permanent UPS power distribution, two of the existing PDUs on this have been rewired with higher amperage cable and re-connected to the newer UPS units installed a year ago and power feeds between the 6 PDUs and systems in the shelf systems area have been reorganised. The electrical load on UPS2 has fallen to the point where it will now reliably perform its fortnightly self-test (previously, with an 80-85% load it would abort these tests since it could have resulted in a power outage due to overload).
November 12th: silo3 introduced
Identical to silo2 and its backup silo2-backup, silo3 and the matching silo3-backup mirror server have been brought into service to provide an additional ~10 TB of user storage and are available for use now. Documentation on the silos can be found here.