ScotGRID-Glasgow IBM Cluster
May 2004 to Jan 2005
Following the rebuild of the ScotGRID-Glasgow IBM cluster in April/May 2004, the PBS service delivered ~830,000 hours of cputime to 27 users in ~103,000 batch jobs.
Supported disciplines included - particle physics, bioinformatics, computer science, solid state detector modelling, electrical engineering and geography.
The major feature of the rebuilt cluster was the introduction of 34 additional dual processors, 5 Tbytes of disk storage and the upgrade of the operating system to a mixture of Redhat Linux 9 and Cern Linux 7.3
Choosing Redhat Linux 9 and Cern Linux 7.3 was always seen as a temporary measure while a longer term strategy was evolving.
Jan 2005 to Date
The operating system strategy has now fixed on the Redhat Enterprise family with Scientific Linux 3.0.3 as the first implementation
Starting on Monday 17th January 2005 the IBM cluster will be rebuilt to use Scientific Linux. During the same interruption to service, the opportunity will be taken to apply other more straightforward updates to the software and firmware.
Scientific Linux allows the cluster to operate under the mainstream of Linux developments while affording good compatibility with the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) and the UK National Grid Service (NGS) with which we hope to integrate.
