All hands to the pumps, oh wait, that is Glycol

Unfortunately on Friday the Air Con fairy visited Glasgow and due to a faulty pressure valve decided to sprinkle some magic in one of our plant rooms by dumping liquid coolant onto the floor. We took emergency action and closed down the cluster as the heat being generated in 141 was going above 30 degrees centigrade. The faulty equipment and associated devices were replaced. Thankfully, there hasn't been any damage to the equipment and we will be coming out of downtime and going back into production shortly.

The Higgs appears

This year we haven't been great at keeping up with blog posts but there are many reasons behind this. We have installed a new network, additional cores taking us up to 4000 available job slots and have upgraded the server infrastructure throughout  GU Scotgrid's cluster. Also, we have fallen foul of infrastructure issues and have had problems with the old and replacement Air Con systems. Slowly, we are extracting ourselves from these issues and  recently Professor David Britton gave a lecture on the Grids role in the announcement made in July of this year at CERN during this years Turing Festival. A surprise appearance at the event was Professor Higgs himself.

Professors David Britton (left) and Professor Peter Higgs

Also presenting at the event were Professors Tejinder Singh Virdee and John Ellis of Imperial College and Dr Ben Segal from CERN. The event was one of the kickstart activites for the Turing Festival and enabled the public and academics to get a better over view of what has been involved in getting the experiments this far.

Scotgrid weekend Downtime

Due to an issue with one of the environmental control units relating to our water cooling system we had to take part of the cluster down over the weekend. The issue has now been identified and rectified. Normal service was resumed this afternoon for  the entire cluster.