Lancaster Infrastructure

To achieve economies of scale the first purchase of NWG equipment was combined with the purchase of similar equipment for a local HPC facility. The installation of the equipment in a refurbished room encountered some difficulties and took several months. The equipment went live in August 2006. Our initial intention was to share a number of components between the 2 systems, however the systems have now evolved into 2 completely seperate instances.

During the installation of the system we have gained significant experience with cooling requirements in, we now believe, the rather difficult environment of a former stores location.

Our North West Grid system now consists out of 3 racks and consists of a Sun X4200 headnode, X4100 compute nodes and a Panasas filestore. The nodes are linked with 3 networks for command and control, data transport and interprocess communication using stacked Nortel switches.

We are hoping to expand both our HPC and the North West Grid system in the 2nd half of 2007.

Underneath a diagram of the original Lancaster configuration (North West Grid and HPC)

We are hoping to expand both our HPC and the North West Grid system in the 2nd half of 2007.

Underneath a diagram of the original Lancaster configuration (North West Grid and HPC)

Lancaster System Diagram