Re: Alpha ES45 buildd
On 11 Nov 2011, at 17:08, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 5:16 AM, Tim Cutts <timc@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> As I've said several times, the current ES45 buildd, goetz.debian.org, will be available for someone to take as soon as the official Debian alpha ports no longer need it for Lenny support. Once Wheezy is released, and official Debian Alpha support therefore really does end, the two ES45's that I currently host for Debian (and a third which we have kept so we have some spare parts) will become available, and I'm sure the Sanger Institute will be happy to donate them to the unofficial Alpha port, although someone else will need to come and collect them from our data centre near Cambridge, UK, and host them somewhere else.
>
> That's the thing. The hardware itself costs essentially nothing in
> comparison to having a place to keep them powered, cooled, and
> connected to the internet.
Very true.
> If I understand correctly, you're saying
> once Debian ends support for Lenny, these systems will be turned off?
Yes, they will, once the DSA team tell me they no longer want them. We no longer have any Alpha machines on site other than these three for Debian. They take up almost an entire rack, and the space and power are much in demand for doing our science. We use Debian heavily ourselves and are keen to give back to the project, so while Alpha is a supported architecture, we're happy to donate time space and power to hosting them, but once the project no longer needs them in its official capacity, there are better things we could do with the power and space (mostly filling it with disks for DNA sequencing data, which we're now purchasing at a rate of petabytes a month). We will be continuing to host and support the other two .d.o systems we have (smetana and sibelius) since those are an active part of the project, but between them they only take as much space as one of the ES45's, and a lot less power...
We're funded by a charity, and at the end of the day we have to show the Wellcome Trust that what we do is of benefit to our research. That's relatively easy to do for supporting the current work of the Debian project, because we have 2100 systems running Debian or Ubuntu, but it's hard to justify for an architecture that we don't use, and that the Debian project is no longer supporting.
Regards,
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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