J.G. Cramer, M.A. Howe, R.J. Seymour, D.W. Storm, T.A. Trainor and J.F. Wilkerson
Our offline computing capacity is divided into five major groupings, with many resources shared across the entire system.
The oldest presence is that of the VMS cluster. It consists of ten VAXstations and a single Alpha 3000/400. The VAXstations are a mix of five 3100s and five 3200s holding from eight megabytes to sixteen megabytes each. Three are diskless. They are all running VMS v5.5-2.
The Alpha 3000/400 has 96 megabytes of memory, two 4-gigabyte (GB) disks, a 2-GB and a 1-GB disk. It also has a CDrom, a 19 inch color display, and two 8mm Exabyte tape drives attached to its external SCSI port. It is running OpenVMS v1.5. Digital's Fortran, C and C++ are the cluster's principal languages.
The entire VMS cluster shares seventeen gigabytes of disk space.
We use TGV's Multinet to provide our cluster with TCP/IP access to the Internet. Our primary Internet address is npl.washington.edu (128.95.100.10).
"NPL" is one of the VAXstation 3200s, with DHv11s driving our thirty-odd local rs232 terminals.
The second major computing presence is the Relativistic Heavy Ion's group of Hewlett Packard Unix systems. These are all HP 9000/7xx-family machines, ranging from our original pair of HP 9000/710s through four 9000/712/60s to the newest arrivals, a pair of 100 MHz dual-processor HP 9000/770s, also known as J200s or "Skyhawks". These eight machines use NFS to share fifteen disks for a total capacity of twenty-one gigabytes. The J200s are running HP-UX v10.01, the rest run versions ranging from 9.01 to 9.05.
Each November for the past two years has seen a number of our HP systems traveling to CERN to participate in the NA49 runs. In November 1995 four systems and a number of disks left, and the remaining two systems were reconfigured with respect to who had which disks and peripherals. A month after the four returned the two J200s were added to the group. Each of these cluster reconfigurations entailed making the travelling systems part of CERN's environment upon their arrival, and reintroducing them to the UW NPL environment upon their return. Much of the CERN configuration was preformed by Predrag Buncic.
One of the 9000/710s serves as the lab's World Wide Web server (www.npl.washington.edu).
The third major presence is the SNO group's collection of over fifteen networked Macintoshes. They also have a Sun SparcStation 20 running SunOS v1.4 to provide CADENCE circuit layout facilities to our electronics shop.
The fourth major presence are the ubiquitous Intel-based PCs. The Mass8 and gravity groups are the prime users of this platform, with another pair dedicated to AutoCAD service, and a pair in the front office performing administrative duties.
The fifth presence is the "miscellaneous" group, consisting of: