ASTRONOMY

The new storage cluster at RAL CCLRC comprises 11 dual Intel Xeon servers, 22 Infortrend IDE RAID storage units and 264 high-capacity hard drives. The total storage capacity of the cluster will be 53 TeraBytes. This storage capacity is the equivalent of more than 2500 standard desktop PC hard disks which could store the equivalent of more than 81,231 CDROMs. The new compute cluster contains 80 rack-mounted servers with 160 Intel Xeon 2.67 GHz CPUs with a theoretical peak performance of 850 GigaFLOPs, or 850 billion calculations per second. Both clusters were delivered and installed by ClusterVision in a short time frame as the capacity of the previous compute and storage facilities had reached its maximum usage. Dr Andrew Sansum, Technical Manager for the GridPP computing service at CCLRC, said: "The NEC / ClusterVision consortium was selected from a large number of potential suppliers for their proven experience with similar large-scale implementations and their well-thought-through design which also offered the best price/performance."