www.lewiz.org

Last Tuesday Vlad and I managed to get ourselves a guided tour of the Manchester Computing Machine Room. We had been asking Mike Richardson some technical questions about how MC handle email on behalf of CompSoc and just asked whether it would be possible to take a look.

And it was! We spent about 20 minutes looking around the various different machines (including the UA2 box, Green (an SGI Origin 3800 with 512 MIPS CPUs and half a terabyte of memory) and various other high performance clusters and supercomputers). Some of the more interesting pieces of kit were the giant StorageTek tape libraries and “simple” clusters, not to mention the MC mail servers.

According to Mike Richardson, who was in charge of MC email until switching to networks, MC have approximately 100 machines dedicated to routing mail. It really puts CompSoc’s single mail and login servers into perspective!

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Now to find an excuse to visit again…

Tags: computing

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