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Computing Infrastructure Support (CIS) Computing Support Request Computer Security Unix Services ISS Mercury Project |
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Upgraded Central UNIX Server Offers Greater Speed, Computing Capabilities As part of their continuing effort to improve services, the UNIX Group in the Lab's Computing Infrastructure Support Department has upgraded LBNL's Central UNIX server, ux8.lbl.gov, to a Sun Enterprise 4500. The new server represents a significant increase in midrange compute capability. Depending on the nature of the application, users can expect performance improvements of six to 15 times that of the previous server. Users will also now be able to run significant computation jobs that would have been impossible previously, such as larger memory footprint simulations. Even greater performance improvement is within reach of those interested in optimizing and tuning their code with the new tools from the vendor. The Sun Enterprise-class machines have been successfully deployed in a number of mission-critical facilities at the Lab and have been impressive in their stability and performance, according to Gary Jung, UNIX Group leader. "The new machine has been running the latest version of the Solaris 7 operating system from Sun for almost a month now and we continue to be pleased with its performance," Jung said. The server will continue to support logins and provide access to mathematical and other scientific packages, such as Mathematica and NAG, software development tools (Sun Workshop 5.0 including C/C++, Fortran 90) and the popular software farm tools (GNU software, TeX, X11, etc.). In its present configuration the new Enterprise server is equipped with six 400Mhz, 64-bit UltraSPARC II processors with 3 gigabytes of memory on a 100BaseT switched network, and has a large amount of potential expansion capacity. The machine has also been certified Y2K compliant per the vendor's test suite. |
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