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New systems provide dramatic improvements in storage capacity and network performance
By Jon Neher (jneher@darkwing.uoregon.edu)
In early August, Computing Center staff installed the most significant hardware upgrades to GLADSTONE and DARKWING in several years. These new systems provide dramatic improvements in performance and storage capacity over the older hardware they are replacing.
Each new system is a Sun E5500 with 160 GB of storage for users' directories. The new DARKWING has 8 400mhz CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. The new GLADSTONE has four 400mhz CPUs and 2 GB of RAM. This represents approximately a fourfold increase in raw computing power as well as disk capacity for each system. There is plenty of room for future CPU and disk expansion on these new systems, too.
Disk I/O will be much faster because the system now uses hardware RAID disk trays. These disk interfaces support up to 40 Mb/sec transfer rates, an eightfold increase in I/O speeds for disk access. Both systems make use of gigabit ethernet network interfaces, which operate at 10 times the speed of the older 100 megabit ethernet cards.
The new systems run the Solaris 2.7 operating system that supports a true 64-bit instruction set (as opposed to 32-bit instructions on the old systems). To take advantage of this, use the new Sun Workshop 5.0 Compilers that are also now installed on the systems.
Because of the additional storage available, the standard user disk quota has been increased from 10 MB to 20 MB on both systems. Mail delivery has been standardized to deliver to users' home directories on DARKWING as it already is configured on GLADSTONE. This should improve performance as well as eliminate the need to track a separate "mail" quota on DARKWING.
Many compute-intensive, third-party applications are supported on both DARKWING and GLADSTONE, including matlab, SAS, SPlus, Mathematica, and SPSS. Over time, many of the applications supported on the alphacluster will be moved to these Sun systems (see "ALPHA Software Migration").