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We are very excited and privileged to announce the purchase and installation of two new, enterprise-grade servers to replace our old, decrepit ones - some of whose components are older than the incoming freshers!
These servers are a joint project between the 5 computer science-related societies: HackSoc, CyberSoc, DevSoc, YFOSS (formerly YorDevs) and the York AI society. Not only will these provide exciting new resources for our individual events, from Hack The Box at CyberSoc to custom game servers at DevSoc; they will also provide a buffet of 24/7 digital services, from an events platform to a thriving Matrix community.
These servers represent far more than this though, they represent the first component of a brand new collaboration initiative between everyone in the computer science community. We're keeping a lot of what's been planned under wraps but we're really excited to announce it in the near future. Keep an eye on the societies' socials/news pages because you won't want to miss this!
A huge thank you must first be given to the University of York alumni who made this project possible. We were generously awarded funding via the YuFund grant which has allowed us to purchase much more modern, capable and useful hardware. We are all incredibly grateful for the opportunities this has opened up and we look forward to delivering the benefit to the entire York community.
The two servers are virtually identical Dell R740 XD 2U Rack Servers. They are each equipped with 8TB of NVMe SSDs, two Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 CPUs (each with 28 Cores @ 2.1GHz), 224GB of RAM and a dual 25GBit SFP NIC. The first server, Freeman, is also equipped with an Nvidia A10 graphics card for graphics and machine learning workloads.
This leads nicely to the names: Freeman and Atwood were chosen in honour of two excellent and dedicated lectures in the department; Mike Freeman & Katrina Atwood. Mike even christened the server with a visit from his trademark Bob the bug.
The servers will run Proxmox, an incredibly capable open source hypervisor and are sited separately in the two campus data centres. They will work in a high-availability configuration; this means if one is to fail, the other can take over and continue to service essential tasks.
We want these assets to be as visible as possible, delivering value to you dear student and to the wider community. All 5 of the societies will have full access to the Proxmox UI: with free reign to leverage the resources and providing another tool to deliver the most insightful, fun and engaging events. You'll also see a broad range of publicly accessible services, hosted by the societies and available to all completely free for the benefit of all.
The project is all about delivering for the entire community so other societies can request free usage for the servers to, for example, host their websites or whatever other small tasks they may require.
If even that leaves a need un-serviced, as a HackSoc member, you can gain access to the servers for whatever private projects you desire; completely safe and isolated in your own virtual private infrastructure. Sadly, we are unable to offer this service to previous graduates although they are free to make use of publicly available services.
We would like to once again reiterate our thanks to YuFund for this opportunity. We encourage everyone keep their eye on all the society media channels; both for the new services that will be coming online and for the launch of the wider collaboration project.
We are committed to delivering for everyone, don't make us leave it on the doorstep. 🍺
