Dear SCARF users,
A happy New Year to all, and I hope you had an enjoyable break!
In case you missed the announcement, thanks to the hard work of Kevin Haines here and the vendor of our storage system (Panasas), SCARF snuck back into service on Christmas Eve. A few intrepid users ran some jobs over the holidays, but as of now there's still plenty of capacity on the cluster.
As a quick update, we're just about to place the order for the latest SCARF hardware refresh. We'll be adding a total of 288 CPU cores to the cluster, which will be the latest Intel Nehalem processors that have been impressing everyone so much lately. As an extra bonus, each core will have 3GB memory (rather than the 2GB we have currently), and each dual-socket quad core server will have DDR Infiniband rather than the SDR used by the current SCARF-Intel nodes.
We'll give you more information as soon as we have it, but the first testing is not likely to start much before the end of March, with general availability in the April/May timescale.
As usual, if you have any problems in using the cluster then please contact the help desk ([log in to unmask]) and we'll do our best to sort you out.
Wishing you a productive 2010,
Duncan
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