The School has been allocated £2M funding from the University to increase the cooling and power capacity of the Forum server room. This should allow us to add around 60 additional GPU servers. Completion of the project is expected early Q2 2025 and is starting this month (November). The project will build a large chiller […]

In order to minimise the risk to computing facilities during the strike action there will be a ‘change freeze’ for those computing systems managed by the School’s computing staff: the University’s Information Services are implementing a similar ‘change freeze’. This ‘change freeze’ is being extended to cover the online class exams on Thursday 5th, Friday […]

In order to minimize the risk to computing facilities during the strike action there will be a ‘change freeze’ for those computing systems managed by the School’s computing staff. This will be effective from Friday 23rd February to Wednesday 21st March (or the end of the industrial action). Obviously there may be some business critical […]

Most of you should now be aware that the College recently introduced a policy requiring the encryption of mobile devices and desktops, particularly where these are likely to be used for handling sensitive data. Sensitive data can include :- email from students to personal tutors or from staff to their line managers about their health […]

Porting DICE to a new version of the Redhat platform is a non trivial task. For a flavour of the work involved, you can read the final report for the base platform upgrade project. Note that this doesn’t include the additional work in updating all the teaching and software packages that we add to Redhat.

As reported in previous posts (Upgrade of DICE desktops to SL7, Seven), we have been working hard on preparing DICE for upgrade to Scientific Linux 7. We are on track to begin upgrading DICE desktops in May, completing the teaching labs by the start of academic year 2015/2016 and all desktops by Xmas 2015. We […]

On the evening of 6th January, one of the disks in the IBM storage array used to provide storage for KVM guests at the Forum decided to go faulty. As with other storage arrays, this should not have been a major issue. One of the hot spares should have been brought on-line and the array […]

I’m sorry to report that we shall not be upgrading the DICE teaching desktop platform this summer. This means that the DICE teaching platform will be SL6 based for another academic year. We had hoped to upgrade to a free derivative of Redhat Enterprise 7 (RHEL 7) this summer, but unfortunately RHEL 7 has only […]

The School produces an annual computing plan which :- states our current strategic objectives reports on goals set in the previous year’s plan lists goals for the current calendar year provides feedback and input to Information Services The plan is available, along with plans for previous years, on the Computing Strategy Group wiki.

Every now and then, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On the 13th January, the computing staff were told that over the preceding weekend, as a result of a gas explosion in the basement of Appleton Tower, all of our IT equipment in the AT basement had been destroyed. […]