Here are some pictures of dexter, the new compute cluster we’ve been in the process of purchasing, installing, and configuring for the last few months. It’s been a long process but we’re now onto final acceptance testing. It belongs to the Wales, Frenkel, and Miller groups. Chris Whittleston took the pictures.
We have run out of space to put new machines in Chemistry so the machine is being hosted in Engineering. We’re renting rack space in their research server room, which is a modern design with very efficient cooling. This is the first time we’ve managed machines on a remote site so we paid a lot of attention to getting the emergency access features right. We can connect to every node in the cluster as if we were sitting in front of it with a monitor and keyboard plugged in. We can even turn the power supply off and on over the network.
One half of the front. We’ve spread the machine out over two server racks. It would physically fit into a single rack with room left over, but there is a limit to the electrical power supplied per rack so we have to use two.
