[Clusterusers] compute-1-6 and 1-7 are dead, long live compute-0-1 through compute-0-4 (and 0-5 through 0-8 soon!)

[Wm. Josiah Erikson]

Hello all,

    I have removed compute-1-6 and 1-7, the oldest single-CPU nodes in
the cluster, which were taking up 2U each, to make room for 8 shiny
"new" Dell 6220 nodes, each of which have dual octa-core Xeon E5-2650's
and 64GB of RAM. This makes them by far the most powerful nodes in the
cluster, as they should be. You'll notice they present to the OS as if
they had 32 CPU's each - this is hyperthreading in action, though there
is an actual execution unit attached to each of those virtual cores, so
we should probably leave it on. However, if we're not seeing significant
performance speedups from them, we could try turning it off.

    Right now I have four nodes up and running. I'm going to add them to
tractor with some sensible service tags... I'll assume "tom" should be
one of them, Tom?

    Four more are in the mail - the originals got damaged in shipping
and they're sending me some replacement parts.

-- 
Wm. Josiah Erikson
Assistant Director of IT, Infrastructure Group
System Administrator, School of CS
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 559-6091