Late last week, I visited fellow DD Tim Cutts at the
Sanger Institute just south of
Cambridge. I dropped off a couple more machines that the BOFHs there
have kindly offered to host for Debian, and Tim offered me a quick
look around their facility. Sanger plays host to a massive set of
computers used for genetic sequencing and related tasks. They have a
very impressive setup with thousands of machines in multiple machine
rooms, connected via huge amounts of (very neatly laid!) power and
networking. Oh, and multiple petabytes of disk
storage, with terabytes more data generated every day.
The coolest thing? Tim told me that the majority of their machines
are running Debian, mostly stock installations with no special tweaks
needed. Yay!