The specification of the system unit requirements remains work to be done. This is pending the results of evaluation of the prototype farm system by the Joint Project collaborators. Procure a couple test farms of approximately 10 worker units for Production Management development projects and code development tests for the collaborations. May 2000 Begin final procurement round for farms equipment. The CDF model would be particularly aggressive in this regard.
Work is ongoing now to try to understand the bottlenecks.
The network connections to the worker nodes are expected to be 100baseT to take advantage of the market sweet spot. This should provide sufficient capacity to the individual nodes for a modest cost. The switch fabric determination is currently under discussion as part of the Networking Task Force and will be determined by market pricing and interconnect needs with the rest of the Run II infrastructure. This keeps a modular nature to the farms deployment with low impact expected on throughput. Initial siting discussions have been held to find a location for the Run II farms within FCC2.