HEP Computing at QMW

Current System is mostly Linux based these days using Red Hat 6.1

• 2 Linux servers, 500 MHz Dual Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 1x22GB IDE disk, 1x18 GB SCSI disk on each
• 12 Linux desktops, 266/350/500 MHz Dual Pentium II/III, all with 256MB RAM, lots of disk space

• 4 Sun SPARC workstations, 2xSolaris 2.6, 2xSolaris 2.7

• 9 DEC alphas running DEC Unix 4.0d - slow and unpopular - mostly gathering dust
• 1 DEC alpha running VMS 6.1 - used mainly by professors for email

• 1 NT server (Pentium 133,  64MB RAM) - used for authentication only - disks are now served by Linux + Samba
• 2 NT workstations (Pentium 133, 64MB RAM)
• 5 Virtual NT workstations via VMware running under Linux

• 3 Laptops - 1xIBM Thinkpad running Windows 95, 2xDELL Inspiron 3500s running Linux

• Approx 1 TB of disk space distributed across the cluster (0.5 TB on a BaBar Solaris box)

• SSH (Teraterm + TTSSH plugin) used on all machines
• AFS installed on all unix machines (Transarc on SPARC/Alpha, Arla on Linux)

• Switched 100Mbit UTP network

Future

• Phase out DEC alphas, replace with Pentium class machines running Linux
• Buy a Gigabit ethernet switch to connect our servers to the rest of the cluster
• Buy more 100Mbit switches

Other Comments

• Star Office 5.1 is used by members of the group as a viable alternative to MS Office on Linux and Solaris
• For people who must have windows, VMware is proving popular and more than adequate. It also frees up otherwise idle CPU for batch work
• We use a home grown (Alex Martin) batch queueing system written in Perl (with great success)

Links

p.dixon@qmw.ac.uk

Last updated on 11th November, 1999