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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Website Support
Thread: WCG Boinc Hardware |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 11
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I've looked but seem to have missed any discriptions of the WCG Boinc Equipments? Something like:
Hdware Blade systems -- 8 Hard Drives -- 16 B/U Batteries -- 8 Mem -- etc Software Dec RT-11 Fedora Core 9 BingBong Gridware 22.3 etc. Is there something like this floating around us grunchers could look at to see what we have to work with ? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi PTabolinsky,
There is no description that I know of. Back when the WCG started up running the UD client, there was a promotional release showing a picture of some racks with lots of cables neatly bundled up.  Since then, there has been a lot of upgrading with more hard disks, but I have not heard any specific figures.Lawrence |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I would like a tour, see the hardware and meet the team.
 This would answer the two burning questions I have...where they are located and what kind of hardware they are running.  -Brink |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
... questions I have...where they are located and what kind of hardware they are running. -Brink Better wait until Spring since the system failure happened in the middle of the last Colorado snow fall (blizzard ?) :>) |
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retsof
Former Community Advisor USA Joined: Jul 31, 2005 Post Count: 6824 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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... questions I have...where they are located and what kind of hardware they are running. -Brink Better wait until Spring since the system failure happened in the middle of the last Colorado snow fall (blizzard ?) :>) 
SUPPORT ADVISOR
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi PTabolinsky, There is no description that I know of. Back when the WCG started up running the UD client, there was a promotional release showing a picture of some racks with lots of cables neatly bundled up. Since then, there has been a lot of upgrading with more hard disks, but I have not heard any specific figures.Lawrence Hi Lawrence: I guess the real reason I asked was to see if I could get together a couple of bucks and send it in so as to maybe get a stand-bye Hard Disk. Also If one of the guys/girls, au.... people could take a roll of film with one of those plastic cameras they could post it on site for us to look at and maybe even issue another PR release. A good story here about the Blizzard of 06 and the WCG fatal crash that held 500,000 computers at bay..........etc. while trying to serve human kind with medical research, etc. :>) Could get us some money for another site or even well earned party time and place for the people who keep things together. PaulT |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello PTabolinsky,
My guess is that hardware failure started trashing the system without giving a failure indication. So by the time the system actually died, it was necessary to rebuild the database from the backup transaction logs, which is a time-consuming process. My reason for thinking this is that they were talking about rebuilding from tape. A simple hard drive failure can usually be quickly recovered from simply by reconfiguring, but not all hardware failures are that easy. Lawrence |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
... the database from the backup transaction logs, which is a time-consuming process. ... My reason for thinking this is that they were talking about rebuilding from tape. Lawrence Hi Lawrence I really do not know how large a DataBase the data consumes but I do know that "tape" has been and is very unreliable. I tried tape once for a while but when I needed to do a restore and the tape failed (several times) for really stupid reasons I took out all my tape drives and trashed them, never went back! They were big company hardware also. Went to redundant HardDrive for backup and restoral. Now, CD moved up to DVD and with software that will bridge between sets of multi-CD/DVD disks, hight reliability, and very low cost hard to see other hardware for archives. I can remember about 10 years or more back when at a very predecious large university I was talking about Linux blab, blab, ya-da when some of the IT folks (most of them) laughted at Linux OS as productive software. Same deal here (not talking about WCG but accepted/tried industry tactics for backup restore). Remember the old "Transputer Chip ?" Looks like same deal here with the other discussed hareware. Single vendor, proprityary software, tight legal patents, lock into my company leads to dead deals. Hurts Humanity in long run. Case in point for open systems when IBM opened up the original PC hardware back in ???? they got multi-billions in good PR, advertisement, etc. for what I believe was a marketing/technical mistake on their part ! At no cost LOL PaulT [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Dec 31, 2006 4:43:50 PM] |
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Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
We used to run 'Kennedy' tape drives to collect geophysical log data in the terabytes.... Time consuming to play back, but highly reliable. Given WCG is in a IBM server room, presume them not running on any kiddy stuff and given all came back thru to the last bit after multiple interruption and issues in the last few weeks, i'm not particularly concerned and we should not. Compared to some other DC places, the commitment is non plus ultra.
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boulmontjj
Senior Cruncher France Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 317 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi every body,
----------------------------------------May be i did not understand every thing in that post. I think i have understand that some of you think it is not the best way do backup data on tape. Don't forget IBM provide hardware for that project and i suppose they are not going to buy some concurent hardware. And to be honnest, i am Storage Manager in a big computer center in France with IBM and none IBM hardware. Our site me run 24/24 365/365. All offsite backup are done on ... IBM tape drives with high capacity and we never had any problem to read back data from tape. And it take less time to write 1 terabyte in the VTS that it take on CD's or DVD's. And an other question, how many DVD's can we put in a tape like Jaguar model ? We are not here to discuss about our job or IBM hardware but i don't think it is our job to discuss about technologie provided by IBM for free.  |
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