VirtualRDC News @ Cornell

The current VirtualRDC is composed of

• a dual-processor Xeon 2.8Ghz (Dell PowerEdge 2600) with 2GB of RAM.
• a dual-processor, dual-core Opteron 2210 (Tyan S3970) with 8GB of RAM.
• a quad-processor, dual-core Opteron 8218 (Dell PowerEdge 6950) with 32GB of RAM.
• a quad-processor, quad-core Xeon E7330 (Dell PowerEdge R900) with 128GB of RAM.
• a quad Itanium 1.7Ghz (Intel SR870BN4 Tiger) with 16GB of RAM
• a quad Itanium 1.5Ghz (2x SGI Altix 330) with 16GB of RAM

The user interface and the directory structure are explicitly intended to replicate as closely as possible the Census RDC environment, although recent switch-over by Census from Novell/SUSE Linux to RedHat has introduced minor differences.

Note that although we are running one of the newest Itaniums (thanks to support by Intel), the 32bit login nodes are dated. Remember that the purpose of the VirtualRDC at this time is not to be a fully autonomous computing environment, but rather a testing and preparation terrain for programs and projects that will later be moved into the real RDC. However, once synthetic data becomes available, the computing environment will be beefed up and expanded, in order to do real data analysis using the synthetic data.

At present, the VirtualRDC nodes have about 5 TB of storage spread across the servers, in a combination of slow storage and fast temp space.

Some VirtualRDC nodes are dedicated to restricted-access projects related to synthetic data, others are available for general purpose computation on synthetic-data-related projects. Contact the VirtualRDC for more information.