Cluster Room

Not much time or good weather to get out recently but I've been back in the cluster room again, getting some shots for the Christmas meeting (none of which were used but, whatever). Some of these really show up the deficiencies of Aperture's RAW processor. Blue LEDs and highlights end up as purple blobs, or with posterisation of what should be smooth graduations of colour.

All of the straight lines also show the lack of distortion removal at wide angles. Hence I've been trialling DxO Optics Pro 8. This has very good distortion removal and handles some of the failings of Aperture much better. DPP from Canon also does a good job of processing wide angle shots very well, although it softens the end image far more than DxO. Still, these are extreme examples and usually for wildlife and landscape work Aperture is good enough, and even on sale, £179 for DxO is just too much to fix a few images and the workflow becomes a lot more complicated. I hate Post Processing enough without adding a whole load extra!

New Force10 Switches

New Force10 Switches

New Force10 Switches and Network Servers

HAMMER Grid Cluster

Cluster room and old networking

Cluster room and old networking

Core HEP servers and HAMMER