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Centre for Internet Technologies

The University of Sunderland Grid Computer

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Grid Hardware

Photograph of several compute nodes

The Grid consists of 40 compute nodes plus two head nodes. Each node is a Dell 2950 Server, with two dual-core 2.6GHz chips and 8GB of RAM. Each node contains a scratch disk which is used to hold the local operating system copy.

Each node contains three network adapters, each 1GB ethernet. One network operates as a normal data network with dedicated gigabit ethernet networks for two other specific purposes. A Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage unit provides 7.5TB of data storage.

The Grid facility includes 10 high specification workstations for users, and four wall-mounted LCD panel monitors for display purposes.

The Grid operates its own dedicated network, with a link onto the campus network via a gateway. This allows the Grid to function without affecting other network operations in the university, and also means that the Grid is never affected by network contention on the campus network.