Toys

One good thing that happened this last week was that I got access to the compute-cluster in the Computer Science Department here. That is a very cool toy! It has 36 Sun V20z computers, each with two processors and four gigabytes of memory (full specs below), all connected by a high-speed network to each other and a 4TB disk array.

There is some special software (Sun's Grid Engine) that is used to manage and share access to it, and I spent most of the week learning how that works. I'm itching to try out my latest research system on, but that will have to wait until Tuesday as it's a long weekend here (Monday is President's day).

Sun V20z:

• 2 x 2.6Ghz AMD Opteron processors
  
• 4GB of RAM (running at 400Mhz).
  
• 2 x 1Gbit Ethernet ports
  
• 2 x 100Mbit Ethernet ports
  
• 1 out-of-band processor for remote management
  
• 73GB hot swap SCSI hard drive