title Visiting Dave Dood at the Sanger Centre - 23rd April 2004
intro Former Trigenix (3G LAB) sysadmin, Dave, moved on to work at the Sanger Centre. The boys eventually got round to organising a visit to see him and all his cool "big iron" toys. The Sanger Centre is one of Nosher's "wish list" places to work - there's some totally cool science (it's the place that has undertaken much of the human genome sequencing project), massive IT infrastructure (nearly half a peta-byte of storage) and a great university-like campus. So cool, some of this stuff could be considered geek pr0n :-) Some photos are the generous contribution of Nick's digicam.
dcp_9364 Craig tries out a 1U Apple
dcp_9365 Dave shows us around machine-room "A"
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dcp_9367 Dave stands in front of an Extreme Networks' switch...
dcp_9368 ...and then Nick scopes it out.
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dcp_9372 Outside the Sanger Centre - the guys do the "tourist" thing
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dcp_9374 Next, we take a stroll to machine-room "B"
dcp_9376 Looking back at the Sanger building
dcp_9379 Looking at more kit
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dcp_9384 Not the usual plug'n'sockets
dcp_9387 A colleague of Dave's in the middle of switching around a load of blade servers...
dcp_9388 ...and shows us one of the blade servers: Intel Xeon, 1GB memory and a couple of 40(?) Gig drives
dcp_9390 The whole lot exposed: around 200 high-spec computers in a case. It's worth it just for the LED count!
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img_0194 A whole stack of old pizza-box 1U servers
img_0196 A bunch of UPSs
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img_0199 Another pre-blade server cluster, with multiple 1U pizza-box servers
dcp_9398 Craig stands in front of a monster power unit: it runs at about 250 kilowatts
dcp_9399 Nosher's used to seeing switches with a fibre backbone interconnect, but this is an actual fibre switch...
dcp_9400 ...and an even bigger one
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dcp_9405 The grounds. How cool is this...
dcp_9408 passing the conference centre on the way to the pub
dcp_9409 Hinxton Hall - in the grounds of the Sanger Centre
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dcp_9414 Nearing the Hinxton Red Lion
dcp_9415 Craig orders a Bitburger beer. Coz it's, er, got the word "bit" in it (geek moment :-)
dcp_9416 In the beer garden
dcp_9417 Nick and Dave dood
dcp_9418 Food arrives
dcp_9419 Nosher's newly-done red hair
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img_0211 Craig and Nosher
dcp_9423 Walking back again
dcp_9424 At the entrance gate
dcp_9425 The Sanger staff restaurant
dcp_9427 The stand-by generators/mini power station. This isn't much smaller than the 3.6 Megawatt Fibropower "chicken shit" power station near Nosher's house in Eye
dcp_9429 A tree on the grounds was apparently struck by lightning and was turned into this funky sculpture which has a helical screw running along it with symbols of evolution and the DNA/RNA letters around it
dcp_9433 The red hair again, on the following Saturday
dcp_9435 Nosher outside his pad