Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2007 17:43:44 -0500
From: glenn@bu.edu
Subject: New Linux computing facility

Dear Researcher,

I am very pleased to announce the availability of a significant addition to the
SCF Linux computing facilities. The new addition is an IBM Blade Center
comprising fourteen nodes, i.e. blades, each with two dual core processors and
8 GB of memory. The nodes are interconnected with a high-speed, low-latency 
(4x Infiniband) network and connected to the other SCF facilities via Gigabit
Ethernet. The processors are 2.6GHz AMD Opterons and the system runs 64-bit
Linux.

This facility is available immediately for all SCF researchers with no charges
against your allocation through the end of the calendar year. In exchange, we
would very much like you to benchmark your codes on the new machines versus the
older Linux cluster or other SCF facilities and share those results with us. In
January, we will announce the SU charge rate for the new system and put
resource accounting into effect.

In January we will also begin to phase out the older X330 Pentium 3 Linux
nodes. For the immediate future we will simply continue to let the older nodes
run. As they fail they will be taken out of service.

The new cluster is called Katana and the login node is katana.bu.edu. Home
directories and login passwords are the same as on the older Linux
cluster. More information about the cluster can be found on our Web site at
http://scv.bu.edu/computation/bladecenter.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me by email
(glenn@bu.edu) or phone (617-353-1319). As always, Kadin Tseng (kadin@bu.edu)
or Doug Sondak (sondak@bu.edu) can assist with any questions regarding
programming, software packages or other issues related to the use of the
facilities.

Sincerely,

Glenn Bresnahan