Our New Cluster

The as-yet-unnamed cluster which will be replacing Orda has the following specifications. It will consist of four (4) blades housed in an existing chassis at the same physical location as the Nova cluster.

Each blade will have the following:

• Two quad-core CPUs (Intel Xeon 2.33 GHz), yielding eight cores per node (or "blade").

• 8GB RAM. This RAM will be in the form of four 2GB sticks; the blades have four DIMM slots. This yields 1GB of RAM per core.

• Two hard-disk drives, for operating system redundancy.

• One fibre-channel card, for access to SAN.

Communication between nodes is with standard Gigabit Ethernet (same as Nova). The chassis is IBM's HS21 BladeCenter.