APAC announced today that SGI is the contracted supplier of the new
National Facility system to replace the Alphaserver SC.

The new system will be an Altix 3700 Bx2 system with 1,664 Itanium2
(1.6GHz) processors with at least 2 Gbytes of memory per processor
(total memory of 3.584 Tbytes).  There will be approximately 30 Tbytes
of global disk (/home, /short) and 73 Tbytes of local disk (/jobfs).
It is intended to operate the system in a mode resembling the current
sc service with a focus on MPI support for parallel jobs.  The
operating system will be based on SUSE linux.

The system will be installed in stages.  At this time it is not
possible to give a precise date for the commencement of a full
production service, but it is expected to be somewhat before mid-year.
We will of course be trying to make the new system available as early
as possible.

We are planning for the sc to continue in operation until a
substantial production service is available on the Altix system, but
because of serious space and air-conditioning limitations, the period
of overlapping services cannot be extensive.  Plans for migration of
packages, asssitance with migrating user codes and files will be
announced later.

However there may of necessity be a number of interruptions to service
during the installation process.  A new 1 Megawatt transformer and
water chillers are being installed to cope with the substantially
increased power requirements and heat load.

First Service Interruption:
  From late 21 to 24 February it will be necessary to decrease the
  number of sc processors available to cope with the heat load while an
  existing airconditioning unit is being relocated.  Our apologies that
  the queues will be even longer during that period.

The lc service will continue throughout except when interruptions to
the power supply in the machine room are essential.

Further details of changeover plans and timescales will be published
on the NF website and in login messages.