Document hardware spec requirements for Linux streaming system

[Tom-Willemsen]

We need to find, document, and then ultimately purchase servers for the Linux streaming system.

Purchasing is out-of-scope for this ticket; this ticket is to:

• Find a suitable spec for our data streaming Linux systems
  • Use old ESS servers, or another suitable server, as a performance-testing platform
  • Talk to other teams who have experience with similar systems (e.g. SuperMuSR)
  • Research general industry recommendations based on our expected message rates, messages sizes, and so on
• Decide on the expected lifetime of the system
• Ensure sufficient performance headroom is available for foreseeable future use-cases (for at least the expected lifetime of the system), code that will be run on this server by other teams, etc
• Document spares strategy
  • Consider using same hardware as SuperMuSR - share spares?
  • Consider using a standardised "neutron" spec - which then needs to be high enough to cope with any neutron instrument
• Document (with justification) the spec that we intend to use as a data streaming ADR

[Tom-Willemsen]

Steer from HRPD-X project management in broad terms is that the sums we're talking about are not particularly large / significant in the context of the wider project, and if there are tradeoffs on cost/reliability we should probably err towards higher reliability (up to a point, obviously).

We may want to spec-up a couple of different hardware options (for example, single node versus a multi-node cluster with some resiliency) and present them at e.g. a HRPD-X computing meeting.