We are still pretty much operating in a maintenance mode with improvements to the Huxley 616 backup infrastructure and internal power distribution ongoing but a few new initiatives have emerged in recent weeks:
new archival server: with the experience gained during the recent user data archival exercise, a separate server called archive1.ma has been added specifically for archival purposes. With 12 TB of on-server storage and the LTO-6 tape drive from the existing backup server, replicant3, transferred to it, archive1 will make large archival sessions much easier to undertake and will no longer cause routine daily backups to be stalled and queued up on replicant3
more on-server storage for the Keaveny cluster: the gehrig.ma compute server is due to be upgraded with a fast 5 disk XFS-based pool to increase the available local storage to nearly 8 TB
Firedrake build servers: firedrake1 and firedrake2 are two servers used as build servers for the Firedrake Project. Our first AMD EPYC processor-based systems, these each have dual 24-core EPYC CPUs, 128 GB of memory and an all-NVMe disk storage system
BigBlueButton teaching platform: an exciting new initiative instigated by Yanki Lekili for real-time online teaching has been introduced using the BigBlueButton software. A formal announcement will be made shortly but this is hosted on a dedicated server along with a second WebRTC server to make it easier for visitors connecting from restricted network environments to make full use of the BBB platform