Page withdrawn 2015 April
 
The NSERC Grant
In spring 2004, Professors Hadi Kharaghani (principal investigator), Joy Morris, Jiping Liu and Wolf Holzmann received a $21,401 NSERC equipment grant toward the purchase a cluster of computers worth over $24,000. The title of the research application was "Search for symmetric designs admitting a group of symmetries". This was the only equipment grant Canada-wide to be awarded in the mathematics group (Pure & Applied Mathematics A, B - GSC 336, 337) that year. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NSERC. In addition we are thankful for the contribution provided by the University through the generous support of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science.
 
The Hardware: A Power Edge Cluster
The equipment purchased consists of a cluster of five Power Edge 1750 servers located in the University's machine room:

original configuration in 2004:

configuration as of 2011:

These are 1-U rack mounted Dell dual processor Xeon 3.06 GHz, 512K cache, 533MHz front side bus machines, configured with 4 GB DDR 266MHz memory, a 73 GB 10K RPM 1" SCSI Hot Plug Hard Drive (expandable to three), dual onboard NICS, 24X CD-ROM, and floppy drive(!).

They were controlled using a KVM switch which was also purchased:

but this switch is nolonger used as it is obsolete.
 
The Software
The machines are called mathad#.cs.uleth.ca where # is 01, 02, 03, 04, or 05. The name refers to hadamard matrices, but is also a play on the word math. They were installed as Linux machines running Red Hat Enterprise Server, with a Linux 2.4 kernel: the operating system was Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 5). As of November 2011 the Linux operating system became CentOS 5.5. Information Technology maintained them and they became fully operational on 2004 July 8. As of November 2011 the Department of Mathematics and CS took over maintaining the machines.
 
The Projects
The machines are being used for combinatorial searches.

Last update: 2015 April 7