HEP Computing at QMW
Current System is mostly Linux based these days using Red Hat 6.1
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2 Linux servers, 500 MHz Dual Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 1x22GB
IDE disk, 1x18 GB SCSI disk on each
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12 Linux desktops, 266/350/500 MHz Dual Pentium II/III, all
with 256MB RAM, lots of disk space
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4 Sun SPARC workstations, 2xSolaris 2.6, 2xSolaris 2.7
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9 DEC alphas running DEC Unix 4.0d - slow and unpopular -
mostly gathering dust
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1 DEC alpha running VMS 6.1 - used mainly by professors for
email
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1 NT server (Pentium 133, 64MB RAM) - used for authentication
only - disks are now served by Linux + Samba
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2 NT workstations (Pentium 133, 64MB RAM)
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5 Virtual NT workstations via VMware running under Linux
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3 Laptops - 1xIBM Thinkpad running Windows 95, 2xDELL Inspiron
3500s running Linux
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Approx 1 TB of disk space distributed across the cluster
(0.5 TB on a BaBar Solaris box)
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SSH (Teraterm + TTSSH plugin) used on all machines
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AFS installed on all unix machines (Transarc on SPARC/Alpha,
Arla on Linux)
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Switched 100Mbit UTP network
Future
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Phase out DEC alphas, replace with Pentium class machines
running Linux
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Buy a Gigabit ethernet switch to connect our servers to the rest of the cluster
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Buy more 100Mbit switches
Other Comments
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Star Office 5.1 is used by members of the group as a viable
alternative to MS Office on Linux and Solaris
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For people who must have windows, VMware is proving popular
and more than adequate. It also frees up otherwise idle CPU for batch work
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We use a home grown (Alex Martin) batch queueing system written
in Perl (with great success)
Links
http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/HEPpc/
http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/HEPpc/RPMS/QMW/
http://www.sun.com/staroffice/
http://www.vmware.com
p.dixon@qmw.ac.uk
Last updated on 11th November, 1999