Date: September 12, 2006 at 1:03:36 AM
Subject: Research system has been upgraded!

New Research System

The CGB has replaced its primary research system that has been in operation since May 10th, 2004. The old hardware has four UltraSparc III processors running at 900MHz and 8GB of memory, and the replacement hardware has four dual-core AMD Opteron processors running at 2.4GHz each (roughly equivalent to eight processors) and 32GB of memory. There is no single apples-to-apples speed comparison that can be quoted to give you an idea of what this change represents. We would expect that many of the computational jobs traditionally executed on the old hardware will see tremendous speed increases on the order of 10x or more, depending on a number of factors.

Architecture Changes

The new research hardware is based on AMD Opteron processors, and the operating system will change from Sparc Solaris to AMD64 Solaris. Any C, C++, Fortran, or other byte-compiled code will need to be recompiled to run on the new architecture. For the most part this should be a simple recompile, but there may be some cases were minor porting is necessary. We will continue to have a Sparc based system available for binaries and other code that cannot easily be ported to the new architecture. Please contact support@cgb.indiana.edu if you run into any problems.

BioPortal Changes

The old research hardware will continue to power the CGB BioPortal for the time being, and serve as a basis for running Sparc only software. The CGB BioPortal will have new content added and will be reorganized to offer more support documentation and better site navigation.

Please submit questions or concerns via our feedback page.

-CGB Bioinformatics Support