Current news...

March 2023 update:

: Things have been rather quiet on the news front with little to report since the last update in August last year which as been mainly due to the lack of physical space to continue expanding the Maths research IT facilities. New initiatives are now having to be installed in my own office for the time being although owing to absence of cooling and only limited network and power provision, this is not an ideal solution.

NextGen cluster: following last autumn's major upgrade with the 8 remaining old Dell R410 and 16 HP BL460c blade nodes all being replaced by new Dell R630 servers, the cluster now has 30 nodes and 672 processors and has since been in full operation with no outages or node failures.
Bazooka Hadoop: this was completely rebuilt in early January and now runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Hadoop ecosystem utilising the original software and applications from the Apache Foundation. Unfortunatley, owing to space problems in the Hxuley 616 server room, the original plan to add another 8 nodes has been postponed for the time being but the cluster has been working very well for this year's Big Data and the ongoing MLDS/AI courses.
Stats HPC cluster upgrade: since its introduction in January last year the Stats HPC has been little-used so only the submission node fallas, with 24 processors, has remained in operation throughout with the 8 compute nodes stats01-08 being powered off. In early August it was fully powered up for an upgrade & update before the compute nodes were again shut down as a precaution during the heatwave. However, if the demand arises it is easy to power one or more nodes back on to povide the full 88 processor capability.

Coming soon...

Two new GPU servers: after successfully winning additional funding from EPSRC, we have now taken delivery of two more GPU servers - one, which will be known as nvidia5, is fitted with eight nVidia RTX 3090 GPU cards and the other, nvidia6, has 4 of these same cards. nvidia5 will be used as a 'production' service for general purpose GPU projects alongside the existing nvidia4 server, running the latest stable builds of CUDA and cuDNN, while nvidia6 will be targeted for use in more experimental 'bleeding edge' applications where possible instability and/or downtime will be less of an issue in this type of environment. These servers will be installed once space has been found to accommodate them.
More storage servers: to support the steady increase in size of the datasets being worked with in Maths, a "semi-official" 128TB server called 'r730xd' has been installed in my office and is being used for a few specific data analysis projects. Eventually, this will be relocated to a proper server room when space becomes available.
Just before Christmas, we acquired a large storage server with 36 x 3TB hard disks plus two SSDs (solid state drives) from the Environmental Research Group (ERG) at the White City campus. Most of the existing 3TB disks are being given to another department on the South Kensington campus while the two SSD disks and the hard disk controller have already been upgraded and we hope to be filling the disk bays soon with 16TB disks to create a storage server with 512TB of usable storage (576TB of installed disk). Again, this is dependent on resolving accommodation space issues.

Older news items:


: August 13th: Mid-August update; July 5th: Early July update, RStudio upgrade for apollo Stats MSc server; June 15th: June update, Huxley server room expansion, Huxley 616 network management improvements; May 4th: April update, tape backups, development of a new Hadoop/Spark platform completed; March 16th: March update, job management for the forrest GPU server, development of a new Hadoop/Spark platform; December 23rd: a mini-HPC for Stats; August 14th: two more compute servers added to the Stats MSc compute pool; July 19th: July update: extensive updates to the Stats MSc compute servers, CUDA and cuDNN updates for nvidia4; June 19th: June update: new archival server, storage upgrade for Keaveny cluster, Firedrake build servers & Big Blue Button server; May 21st: Degond Cluster becomes a full HPC; March 24th: Degond Cluster fully upgraded; February 25th: a GPU server for the StatML CDT; February 1st: Bazooka Hadoop cluster control network switch replaced; September 24th: all Stats' general purpose compute systems now running Ubuntu 18.04; August 9th: new GPU server nvidia4 introduced; April 7th: Magma software upgraded to version 2.25-4; March 17th: a new 8 card GPU server installed; March 2nd: another backup server added; February 28th: internal network expansion, ma-backup4 and GPU servers coming soon; February 6th: more large compute servers for Stats; November 1st: NextGen is shutting down on November 1st in readiness for relocation; September 29th: matlab2018 queue has now been discontinued on the NextGen cluster; August 24th: matlab2018 queue to be discontinued on the NextGen cluster; August 14th: more servers for Stats, remote monitoring upgrades, better system status reporting and more power supplies; June 23rd: more servers in the server room, expanded Bazooka Hadoop cluster now available for use; May 29th: R Shiny server memory replaced & remote management added; April 12th: NextGen cluster Maple 2019 upgrade completed; March 16th: Planned Bazooka Hadoop cluster upgrade, reorganisation of backup servers; February 19th: ma-offsite2 now online; January 19th: Matlab 2018b upgrade ongoing; December 14th: Matlab upgrade to version R2018b started, Stats section compute & storage enhancements completed, silos3 and 4 introduced; September 18th: more local storage for Stats modal server and new PostgreSQL database server launched; August 29th: new 'du' command options, cluster R upgrade and ma-backup3; July 2nd: nvidia3 now has two GPU cards; May 15th: Early summer update; March 29th: Easter update; March 24th: spring update; March 10th: late winter update; December 15th: pre-Christmas update; November 22nd: late November update; October 8th: start of 2017/2018 academic year update; 2017: Midsummer's Day update; June 16th, 2017: mid-June update; June 2nd, 2017: Early summer update; April 20th, 2017: Spring update 2; March 22nd, 2017: Early spring update; March 10th, 2017: Winter update 2; February 22nd, 2017: Winter update; November 2nd, 2016: Autumn update; October 21st, 2016: Late summer update 2; October 14th, 2016: Late summer update; February 19th, 2016: Winter update; December 11th, 2015: Autumn update; September 14th, 2015: Late summer update 2; May 2nd, 2015: Spring update 2; April 26th, 2015: Spring update; November 11th, 2014: Autumn update; September 17th, 2014: Summer update 2; July 17th, 2014: Summer update; March 15th, 2014: Spring update; November 2nd, 2013: Summer update; May 24th, 2013: Spring update; January 23rd, 2013: Happy New Year!; November 22nd, 2012: No news is good news...; November 17th, 2011: A revamp for the Maths SSH gateways; September 7th, 2011: Failed systems under repair; August 14th, 2011: Introducing calculus, a new NFS home directory server for research users; July 19th, 2011: a new staging server for the compute cluster; July 19th, 2011: A new Matlab queue and improved queue documentation; June 30th, 2011: Updated laptop backup scripts; June 18th, 2011: More storage for the silo...; June 16th, 2011: Yet more storage for the SCAN...; June 10th, 2011: 3 new nodes added to the Maths compute cluster; May 21st, 2011: Announcing SCAN large storage and subversion (SVN) servers; May 26th, 2011: Reporting missing scratch disk on macomp01; May 21st, 2011: Announcing completion of silo upgrades; May 16th, 2011: Announcing upgrades for silo; April 14th, 2011: Goodbye SCAN 3, hello SCAN 4; March 26th, 2011: quickstart guide to using the Torque/Maui cluster job queueing system; March 9th, 2011: automatic laptop backup/sync service, new collaboration systems launched; May 20th, 2010: Scratch disks are now available on all macomp and mablad compute cluster systems; March 11th, 2010: Introduing job queueing on the Fünf Gruppe compute cluster; October 16th, 2008: Introduing the Fünf Gruppe compute cluster; June 18th, 2008: German City compute farm now expanded to 22 machines; February 7th, 2008: new applications on the Linux apps server, unclutter your desktop; November 13th, 2007: aragon and cathedral now general access computers, networked Linux Matlab installation upgraded to R2007a; September 14th, 2007: Problems with sending outgoing mail for UNIX & Linux users; July 23rd, 2007: SCAN available full-time over the summer vacation, closure of Imperial's Usenet news server; May 15th, 2007: Temporary SCAN suspension, closure of the Maths Physics computer room, new research computing facilities; January 14th, 2005: Exchange mail server upgrade, spam filtering with pine and various other enhancements

Andy Thomas

Research Computing Manager, Department of Mathematics

last updated: 15.3.2023