Infrastructure
The University of Birmingham is the Regional Network Entry Point (RNEP) to JANET for the Midlands MidMAN network, and has recently made a substantial investment in IT infrastructure (£3.14M SRIF grant supplemented by £1.67M of University funds), facilitating the installation of a campus-wide Gigabit Ethernet network and a new large-scale visualization system established with the help of Hewlett Packard.
For news on the installation and set-up of Birmingham's new e-Science cluster, housed in information services, please click here.
Access Grid Nodes
The Centre will shortly host three Access Grid nodes, one situated at the University of Birmingham, one at the University of Warwick and one at the University of Wolverhampton.
Infrastructure Details
| e-Science Cluster | 54 worker nodes, each with 2 GBytes of memory, 2 Intel Xeon 3GHz processors and 64 GB of local work space. All worker nodes accessible from a master node. |
|---|---|
| Campus-wide Gigabit Ethernet Network | Based on Foundry hardware, and fibre or Category 6 copper cabling |
| Central Application Service | 6 HP J-6700 dual processor nodes, with 2TBytes networked storage |
| Visualisation Centre SV7 | 2 active stereo display channels each with an HP J6750 master node
and four Xeon rendering nodes driving a FakeSpace powerwall |
In addition to the above, a number of workstations are available in various departments together with the following facilities:
| School of Computer Science | Globus enabled DualAthlonMP 1900+ cluster with 1 Master node and 22 slave nodes (46 CPUs) |
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| School of Physics and Astronomy | 128 node DualAthlonMP 1600 Beowulf cluster with 1 TByte of SCSI RAID-5 (Astrophysics and Space, from 2003) |
|
25 node, dual processor, Intel/Linux cluster of SunFire
V60x machines. Each node has 2.8 GHz Xeon processors, dual gigabit
ethernet ports, and SCSI disks. |
|
| 38 node dual-Xeon 2.0 GHz with 4 TByte RAID, 42 node dual-Pentium 0.8 GHz with 2 TByte RAID, 18 node dual-Pentium 0.8 GHz with 1 TByte RAID (Particle Physics) |
|
| School of Chemistry | IBM RS/6000 SP, 8 4-way 375MHz Winterhawk2 nodes, total 48Gb memory |
| 20-node Beowulf, dual Athlon 1.0GHz, 100baseT interconnect | |
| School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering | 20 node packet-switched testbed network, 20 node wireless testbed network, 10 node OpenMosix PC cluster |
| Centre for Scientific Computing, The University of Warwick | SGI Origin with 16 195 Mhz MIPS 10K processors and 5.5 Gbytes of memory |
| Large-scale Myrinet cluster with 96 866Mhz Pentium III processors and 32 Gbytes of memory | |
| Sun shared memory server with 24 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processors, and 18 Gbytes of memory | |
| IBM Myrinet cluster with 128 1.4GHz Pentium III processors, 8 visualization nodes and 128 Gbytes of memory | |
| CU-ADAM Labs, Coventry University | Globus enabled cluster |