Research and Teaching Unit Three Year Spending Plan

Spending plan for the Research and Teaching unit for financial years 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14 under two funding scenarios where the entire computing budget for the next three financial years is either 100k/50k/100k or 100k/0k/100k.

This spending plan assumes that a virtualisation service (KVM) will continue to be provided (sufficiently resourced and funded) outside of the Unit. The unit is already extensively virtualised, physical servers that exist are there purely because of particular performance requirements.

Host (Virtual/Host)	Usage	2011/12 (100k)				2012/13 (50k)				2013/14 (100k)
		Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate	Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate	Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate
cake	Theon (Database/In/Out Server)	REPLACE: age >3yrs; out of warranty; slower than current desktops	three local physical disks, large memory	High	2500	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
burly	Teaching PostgreSQL Database	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED				REPLACE: age >3yrs; out of warranty; disk I/O	RAID Disk, 8GB	Medium	1500; recoup some cost from Teaching Budget; use hand-me-down
castle (VBox/seavixen)	Webots License	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
cracker	Research PostgreSQL Database	REPLACE: age >4yrs; out of warranty; would subsume 'puffin' (public facing), increased use	RAID Disk, 8GB	Low	1500; use hand-me-down	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
cracker	Webmark	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown1 (VBox/wasserboxer) (with ProjectsDB )				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
elephant (VBox/seavixen)	Matlab Research FlexLM Licensing	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
embankment (VMWare)	Theon - Portal	TO BE REPLACED BY stonebridge (VBox/wasserboxer)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
epping (VMWare/metropolitan)	Maple FlexLM & TFTP & Openconf	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
fondant	Theon - UI	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
greenford (VBox/scimitar)	School DB Login & ProjectsDB	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown1 (VBox/wasserboxer) (with Webmark)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
hatchend (VMWare/metropolitan)	IGS/ITO/ISS RT	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown2 (VBox/wasserboxer)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
heffalump	64Bit Large Memory Compute	DEPENDS ON COMPUTE PLAN				DEPENDS ON COMPUTE PLAN				DEPENDS ON COMPUTE PLAN
maida (VMWare/central)	ICSA SIMICS FlexLM Licensing	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
mysore (VMWare/metropolitan)	Tracks not-a-service	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
puffin	Demos/Tomcat	DECOMMISSION (REPLACED BY cracker)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
redbridge (VMWare/wasserboxer)	Theon - Basecamp (SVN+Trac)	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
ruislip (VMWare/central)	Maple14/Matlab FlexLM Licensing	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
scimitar	VirtualBox Hosting	DECOMMISSION: age >7yrs, power hungry				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
seavixen	VirtualBox Hosting	DECOMMISSION: age >7yrs, power hungry				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
snaresbrook (VBox/scimitar)	Web Services	TO BE REPLACED BY unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
victor	Coltex	NO ACTION PLANNED				REPLACE: age >3yrs; out of warranty; disk I/O	RAID Disk		1500	NO ACTION PLANNED
wasserboxer	VirtualBox (or KVM) Hosting	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
NEW	DR/Live Mirror for 'cake'	CREATE unknown (KVM/unknown)				NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION PLANNED
Host	Usage	2011/12 (100k)				2012/13 (0k)				2013/14 (100k)
		Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate	Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate	Action	Spec	Priority	£Estimate
*	*	AS ABOVE				AS ABOVE				AS ABOVE
victor	Coltex	NO ACTION PLANNED				NO ACTION: run out of warranty for a year, fallback to hand me down or desktop as necessary				REPLACE: age >3yrs; out of warranty; disk I/O	RAID Disk		1500

Planned spending total is effectively so low that there is not any significant difference between the two scenarios.

We will need to add a bit of star-gazing into the above as this just assumes ongoing continuance of all existing services.

Beowulf:

In 2012 the compute nodes will be 5 and 6 years old, at some point they will start to fail and we will have to replace them or bin the cluster. The cluster continues to be used for gridengine jobs which for various reasons can't be done on eddie the same compute nodes are part of the hadoop cluster which is used by a number of researchers and the Extreme computing course.

I do not believe the clusters in their current form are sustainable, assuming we wish to keep this functionality I believe we should:

• repurpose equipment which has come out of other use (this has been done with the PE750s which act as GPFS servers)
• replace nodes on an affordable basis ( £2-3K/year) with cheap rackmounts or desktops

with a view to retaining about the same number of cores on a reduced number of nodes. We are currently looking at ways to cut the power useage of the cluster (BeowulfPowerReduction) and replacing older kit would help with this

-- TimColles - 26 Oct 2011