Current news...
May 15th: Early summer update
Once again we seem to have gone from winter to summer in the space of a couple of weeks so here is an update.
Torque and the legacy cluster are no more: the legacy cluster control server, torque.ma, is no more. A virtual machine hosted by ICT, torque has run the Maths compute cluster since its inception in 2010 with almost 2 million compute jobs run during this time. Our rental contract for this server expired on May 5th and has not been renewed since it has been superseded by our own cluster control server, openpbs, in the NextGen cluster.
This also means the legacy cluster no longer exists but legacy node macomp14 still has a long-running job running on it which will be allowed to complete before this node is finally rebuilt and moved to the NextGen cluster.
Other news: a number of stand-alone compute servers purchased by several research groups have been installed in the server room in recent weeks and work is now progressing on a new 7 node MongoDB database cluster for the Fanosearch project; for technical reasons this is a particularly interesting project since the operating speed of this cluster is of prime importance. Using a mix of fast SSD (solid state disks) and SAS hard drives, the cluster will be employing 4 paralleled gigabit network connections for each node using LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) on the dedicated network switch to provide a theoretical 4 Gbit/s network connection for each, which will be a first for this department.
Older news items:
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- 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