The cluster will be initially funded by an NSF grant.
The cluster is expected to generate large savings for Wesleyan over its lifetime. The University Cluster will reduce or eliminate the need for new individual faculty clusters.
The cluster will reside in the central data center in the Exley Science Center and be maintained by ITS. ITS has expanded the power and cooling capacity of the data center to accommodate the cluster. ITS will imminently be hiring a new administrator to care for the cluster.
We currently envision a 64 node, 128 processor cluster, though this is subject to change as we learn more about the architecture options.
We will be considering proposals from Sun, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple, and SGI for the cluster.