An extension to Iridis was installed in May 2002. This extension consists of 110 2U rack mounted dual P4 Xeon nodes in 6 42u 19" racks.

The 6 racks forming the extension to Iridis. The first 2 racks (from the left) contain the 40 HEFCE funded Myrinet nodes (dual 1.8Ghz P4 Xeons, 2Gbyte RDRAM with Myrinet). The 3rd rack (from the bottom) contains the (Extreme Alpine) network switch for this extension, 3 (HEFCE funded) server nodes (will be used to provide Grid/Condor services), 6 (Chemistry JREI funded) large memory (dual 1.8Ghz P4 Xeons, 4Gbyte DDR RAM, Ethernet connected) chemistry nodes and the 1st of a total of 61 standard chemistry JREI funded nodes (dual 1.8Ghz P4 Xeons, 512Mbyte RDRAM, Ethernet connected).

Why the move to rack mounted nodes? a number of reasons including, larger motherboards requiring deeper cases that would not have fitted on the shelving used in the orginal installation, 1 and 2U rack mount chasis have now become common as a result the additional cost of a rack mount solution is now less.