Craig tries out a 1U Apple
Visiting Dave Dood at the Sanger Center, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire - 23rd April 2004
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.
next album: The BBs Recording Session, Pennylane Studios - 25th April 2004
previous album: Thornham Bike Ride, Diss and Ipswich - 15th-17th April 2004
Dave shows us around machine-room 'A'
Dave stands in front of an Extreme Networks' switch...
...and then Nick scopes it out.
Outside the Sanger Centre - the guys do the 'tourist' thing
Next, we take a stroll to machine-room 'B'
Looking back at the Sanger building
Looking at more kit
Not the usual plug'n'sockets
A colleague of Dave's in the middle of switching around a load of blade servers...
...and shows us one of the blade servers: Intel Xeon, 1GB memory and a couple of 40(?) Gig drives
The whole lot exposed: around 200 high-spec computers in a case. It's worth it just for the LED count!
A whole stack of old pizza-box 1U servers
A bunch of UPSs
Another pre-blade server cluster, with multiple 1U pizza-box servers
Craig stands in front of a monster power unit: it runs at about 250 kilowatts
Nosher's used to seeing switches with a fibre backbone interconnect, but this is an actual fibre switch...
...and an even bigger one
The grounds. How cool is this...
passing the conference centre on the way to the pub
Hinxton Hall - in the grounds of the Sanger Centre
Nearing the Hinxton Red Lion
Craig orders a Bitburger beer. Coz it's, er, got the word 'bit' in it (geek moment :-)
In the beer garden
Nick and Dave dood
Food arrives
Nosher's newly-done red hair
Craig and Nosher
Walking back again
At the entrance gate
The Sanger staff restaurant
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
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
The red hair again, on the following Saturday
Nosher outside his pad
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Craig tries out a 1U Apple