Following the installation of two additional 32amp electrical power feeds in Huxley 616 and the installation of another rack cabinet, a new GPU server has been installed which will greatly improve our GPU computing facilities. Fitted with dual 16-core Xeon CPUs, 1.5 terabytes of memory and 14 hard disks providing a total usable local storage capacity of ~30 terabytes, eight nVidia RTX 2080i GPUs each containing 4352 GPU cores and 11 GB of memory are fitted. With support for nVidia's cuDNN (Deep Neural Network) libraries, this new addition is expected to become very popular.
Provisonally named nvidia4, we are awaiting the assignment of a network address before this system can be made available to users.
February 26th onwards: internal network expansion, phase 2
There are 110 college network connections in the Maths server room, Huxley 616, with over 170 systems installed and recent requests to host yet more systems that need to be accessible over the college network. Installing more college network sockets in the room is no longer an option owing to the disruption it will cause and also, the cost; there are no spare ports left on the existing network switches in the level 6 comms cupboard so at least one new switch plus a rack to contain it will be required which is expensive.
A dormant 'background project' that began about two years ago to move systems that did not really need college network connections over to dedicated internal networks and, at the time, freed up about 10 college network connections, has restarted in earnest. We are now moving more systems to internal networks which involves installing additional network switches, cabling and where required, extra network interfaces into systems that do not have sufficient network ports.
Work is ongoing but since February 25th, four college network connections have been released for use by the imminent ma-backup4 and new GPU servers and a proposed private storage server.