The NextGen cluster revealed

As you can see on the right, the NextGen cluster fills an entire rack cabinet and (from the top downwards) it contains:

• network equipment - all of this is actually installed into the rear of the rack where all the cabling is so the only things you can see from the front are the blanking panels used to improve cooling air flow through the cabinet. This equipment is for the dedicated internal network used by the cluster as well as for the separate remote management network.

• below this are openpbs and macomp001 - openpbs is the cluster controller which also provides local DNS and NTP time synchronisation services for the cluster's mathscluster.ma.ic.ac.uk subdomain, remote status monitoring of the nodes and a web-based job status display while macomp001 is the user's submission node where you can submit your jobs

• below these are clustor2 and clustor2-backup - these two larger servers provide the main storage for cluster users with 82 TB of installed disks in each, providing a usable 60 TB of RAID storage in each. clustor2-backup mirrors clustor2

• all of the servers below these are the macompXX nodes, with macomp18 at the top, all the way down to macomp01 near the bottom. The larger server is macomp17

• finally, at the bottom is the HP C7000 blade enclosure containing two rows of eight BL460c g1 blade servers - these are the sixteen mabladXX nodes. At 330 kg this is extremely heavy so it lives at the bottom of the cabinet.