August 29th: using the du command on the Maths compute cluster
An explanation for the discrepancies in file & folder sizes reported by the 'ls -l' and 'du' commands for data stored on clustor2 can be found here along with information about the new '--apparent-size' option recently added to the Linux 'du' command.
August 28th: R upgrade on the Maths Compute Cluster completed
The R installation on the Maths compute cluster has been updated with all addional libraries and packages from both the CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) and BioConductor repositories rebuilt with the latest available versions.
August 24th: ma-backup-3 introduced
To cope with backing up the ever-growing quantity of research data being generated on research group & sectional servers within the department, ma-backup3 has now joined the existing ma-backup1 and ma-backup2 servers. Using the same server set-up as we have used for the past few years (low-cost HP MicroServer with 4 large hard disks and a 4 GB USB pendrive for the FreeBSD operating system), ma-backup3 is the first to be fitted with 8 TB helium-filled hard disks (instead of 4 TB disks in the earlier servers) to provide about 24 TB of resilient disk storage.