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All machines which make up the core group infrastructure are installed with a stable version of Linux (the current standard installation is Scientific Linux 3.0.4. The department is served by a 1 Gbit/s fibre connection directly to the main university router. Within the department, the backbone network is 100 Mbit/s, though there are plans to upgrade this to 1 Gbit/s.
The 80 CPU Workstation UK BaBar farm has been upgraded to use Scientific Linux and the storage available has been increased to 1.5 TB. The farm now plays a useful rôle as a general purpose cluster for running Root analysis jobs for the Liverpool Particle Physics group.The CDF Collaboration’ 10 node dual-CPU Dell cluster with 6 TB of disk and the CDF 8-CPU IBM Xeon continue to be used both remotely from Fermilab and locally.
MAP2
The major development in our computing activities has been the increasing exploitation of the £1.3M SRIF funded supercomputer MAP2; this currently has ~ 900 working Dell Poweredge 650 servers, each with a 3 GHz Xeon CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 120 GB disk: the disk capacity of this farm alone is 100 TB. MAP2 is part of the University of Liverpool’s internal Grid, ULGrid, and the Particle Physics group has access to at least 500 nodes. The nodes are connected to 1 Gb/s Dell switches with a 20:1 contention ratio and these switches are in turn linked to an E600 Force10 switch, each port of which operates at 1 Gb/s fully non-blocking.INd of January 2006, the latest stable version of LCG software was installed and there were ~ 500 nodes on LCG.
The MAP2 cluster has also been heavily used for the production of Monte Carlo events for the ATLAS experiment. Tthe complete ATLAS software chain, including all available MC generators, has been installed on 120 dedicated nodes.
Part of the MAP2 system s( 80 odesd) are permanently assigned to the CDF experiment CAF computing system. Jobs can be submitted via the CAF GUI from any CAF system and the output is shipped back to FNAL automatically. This system has been fully integrated with the grid storage system SAM.
Finally, one rack of 40 nodes is available for use by Liverpool personnel in the T2K and KM3NeT neutrino experiments.
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