The technical details

"magsim" is a Dell "PowerEdge" server, in a box that makes it look rather cleverer than it really is...
It lives in the ETS server room.

It has two 3GHz Xeon Hyperthreaded CPUs, each with 1MB level2 cache and 800MHz Front Side Bus (connection to the rest of the system). Hyperthreading means in this case that each CPU can support two concurrent threads of execution -- i.e. two tasks can be done at once. In fact, due to the shared resources, this doesn't by any means double the performance, but considerable increases even by 50% seem to be possible.

The memory is 2GB (DDR, 400MHz) and there is room for more. Swap is 4GB and can easily be increased in just a couple of minutes if more is wanted: as described below, swap has its own SCSI disk.

There are three SCSI 10000rpm hard-disks:

• the primary one is 30GB and holds the operating system, applications and /tmp directories,
• the second is 70GB and has first the swap space (to supplement the memory) on the fastest part, then two backup partitions for system and homes,
• the third is 150GB and holds the home directories for users,

The backup partitions are only mounted at night, so this disk is usually free for swap alone, which together with its high speed and SCSI connection make the swapping ability far greater than on normal desktop computers where swap uses the same slow disk as everything else lives on and thus cripples the system when swapping heavily.


The operating system, by a computer-science definition, is Linux-2.6.n -- it is a pure ("vanilla") kernel that was compiled on and for magsim with just the necessary hardware support.
By the wider definition of operating system it is a "Gentoo" GNU/Linux system, with a thorough set of GNU utilities (C-compiler, C-libraries, shell, user commands) and many other Free Software programs such as the Xorg X11 graphical libraries and applications, the KDE and GNOME desktop environments and applications, and several proprietary applications such as Femlab, Matlab, Ace, Dymola, Saber, Maple.

All non-proprietary software has been compiled from source-code on magsim, specifically for the Pentium4 architecture and with level 2 optimisation of the GNU compiler.