Quick summary: is Maths research IT awaking from hibernation?
Although the past few months have been rather gloomy with nothing worth reporting, there are signs that the brighter days and the coming spring will see some activity in Maths at last. Already, a few users are interested in purchasing more compute servers and quotations have been obtained.
Work currently in progress includes the reorganisation of the non-rackmount hosted systems shelving area to make better use of the available space. Obsolete and other redundant systems no longer being used have been removed and additional shelves added to accommodate more modern smaller systems.
Remote systems monitoring has been improved with the introduction of a new monitoring server in Huxley 616, which now has direct access to all systems on private/dedicated internal networks in the Maths server room. The sysmon2 software has been further enhanced to provide better hard disk condition analysis and reporting across all systems, support for MapR Hadoop cluster monitoring and additional tests for systems using ZFS storage. The existing monitoring server in the ICT data centre is an old 32-bit desktop PC and cannot move to the new hosting facility in Slough in the summer since only rackmount systems can be accommodated; for continued resilience it will be replaced with a rackmount system in Slough but the server in the Maths server room will become the primary system since it has access to all the networks in use.
Much work was done in February for the LMS (London Mathematical Society) whose web services we host and support, with production sites moving to a new server and development and staging sites moving to virtual servers hosted on another new server.
nvidia3 has been upgraded and updated to meet a particular user's needs and is now available for general use. Fitted with a single nVidia K40 GPU card, this is the highest performing single GPU we currently have.
Important information
Finally, we have started planning ahead for the eventual shutdown of the ICT data centre in the City & Guilds building over the next 18-24 months and its migration to a new facility in Slough. We have over 30 servers hosted in ICT - 24 of these are Maths compute cluster nodes which will probably move to Huxley 616 later this year along with a non-rackmount storage server while the rest will move to Slough, with hardware upgrades where necessary to support full remote management (including the ability to install an operating system remotely from media in South Kensington).
Some private rackmount systems currently in Huxley 616 may have to move to Slough although this is not certain - if it's not possible to install an operating system remotely or if the owner is unwilling to pay for upgrades to allow this to be done, or replace the server with one that has full remote media support, then that server will have to stay in the Maths server room. The main issue with accommodating more systems in the Maths server room now is it is not possible to add any more college network connections on Huxley level 6 since the rack in the network wiring cupboard opposite the south lifts is now full. So an influx of 25 systems into Huxley 616 will potentially be a problem.
For this reason we will have to move nearly all Maths compute cluster nodes onto a private dedicated network which means direct access to a particular node from the college network will no longer be possible although it would still be accessible from a designated head node. This is the norm on HPC clusters and should not inconvenience Maths users that much and it does have the real advantage of faster cluster performance since cluster network traffic will not be mixed with data on the general college network.