About

Technical Information

HARDWARE:

  • Class/Lab Rooms:

    • 58 dual-processor AMD Opteron workstations (model Sun w2100z) simultaneously working as compute nodes
      • each with 2G RAM, U320 SCSI disk
    • Cisco 3500-series ethernet switches with gigabit fiber uplinks
    • Split into two rooms, separable by a retractable wall
    • LCD projectors, chalkboards and whiteboards in each room
      • Configurable as:
        • 1 sm room with 16 student stations and 1 instructor station
        • 1 lg room with 40 student stations and 1 instructor station
        • 1 very large room with 56 student stations & 2 instruct stations, with both LCD projectors and AV equipment outputting same or different data

  • Server Room:

    • 49 dual-processor AMD Opteron 1U rackmount compute nodes
      • Each with 2G RAM, U320 SCSI disk (same as workstations)
    • 2 identical machines configured with 4G RAM (as grid controllers)
    • 2 8-processor AMD Opteron 3U rackmount compute nodes for large shared-memory jobs
      • each with 20G RAM, 2 U320 SCSI disks in RAID array
    • 2 Cisco 3560 gigabit etherent switches
      • one 48-port, one 24-port, with fiber uplinks and SFP stacking cable

  • Disk Backend:

    • 2 Network Appliance Filer 3050's
      • multiple gigabit ethernet uplinks and > 10TB storage (now)
      • Maintained by College of Engineering
      • Provides access to same user data across all OS platforms
      • constantly being expanded to meet growing needs of College

SOFTWARE:

  • Boston University Linux x86_64
    • 64-bit Linux distribution maintained in-house by dedicated BU Linux development team
    • Based on Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS, and Fedora Core Linux
    • Contains AFS and Kerberos network file access and authentication
    • Access to all academic and commercial software maintained by Office of IT, as well as software maintained by College of ENG
  • BU Linux AD Login subsystem
    • Enviroment developed by College of Engineering and Office of IT to provide platform-agnostic access to the same data and authentication backends for all users on all platforms
  • Sun Grid Engine 6.0
    • Open-source, commercially-supported local-area and wide-area clustering backend for a variety of OS and hardware platforms, including Windows and MacOS as well as other UNIXes
    • Allows future scalability beyond college of ENG and beyond Linux
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