Linux upgrade for the cathedral ssh gateway, hardware upgrades for macomp001, SCAN now full-time until April 20th
The operating system on the cathedral.ma ssh gateway has been upgraded from openSUSE 13.2 to openSUSE Leap 42.2. Users will probably not notice much difference except for the improvements the Linux 4.4 kernel brings with it.
The Ubuntu 16.04 test/dev server macomp001 was substantially upgraded on April 20th, with two 3.2 GHz CPUs replacing the original 2.33 GHz parts and the memory was increased from 3 to 16 GB. With an eye to the eventual migration of the main compute cluster from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04, no further development work is being done on the Ubuntu 14.04 test/dev nodes macomp000 and macomp00 although users are free to continue using these if they wish. But you are encouraged to start using macomp001 for all new dev and test projects since the cluster will migrate to Ubuntu 16.04 by the summer of this year. And another good reason for switching to macomp001 - you will find this server much faster than either macomp00 or macomp000.
While the undergrad students are away over the Easter holiday period, the SCAN (Super Computer At Night) cluster will be running full-time in Huxley 410 from 8pm on Tuesday March 28th unti 05:50am on Thursday, April 20th. The part-time cluster in Huxley 215, which runs from 11pm until 05:50, will continue running on the nightly term-time timetable as before.
Reorganisation of the non-rackmount hosted systems shelving area in Huxley 616 to make better use of the available space has mostly been completed.
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 "bare metal" installs, (the ability to install an operating system remotely from media in South Kensington without going anywhere near Slough, for example).
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 is it is not possible to install any more college network connections on Huxley level 6 since the racks in the network wiring cupboard opposite the south lifts are now full. So an influx of another 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 users that much and it does have the real advantage of faster cluster performance since cluster network traffic will not be mixed with non-compute traffic on the general college network.