| Description: | There is many centuries old tradition in the Low Countries centred around giving presents on the eve of Saint Nicolas day, December 5th. It is one of a few traditions that is Roman-Catholic in origin that survived the Protestant Reformation in the traditionally Calvinist Netherlands. Nowadays the holiday is often referred to by St. Nicolas nickname: Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas celebrations entail giving nicely wrapped presents often accompanied by some small written poem. According to the mythology the presents have been delivered by Sinterklaas on his horse riding the rooftops. This year he had to brave a fierce storm.
When arriving in the morning of December 6th at the Donald Smits Center for Information Technology (CIT) there were some nicely wrapped packages delivered the day before. Given the date, this obviously must have been the doing of Sinterklaas. The packages contain the servers and other hardware for what is going to be the CEP (CEntral Processing) III cluster, primarily the successor of the now ageing CEP I hardware. This cluster will have several purposes, but mainly it will be used for developing LOFAR software, algorithms and pipelines and manual processing of LOFAR data. The CEP II cluster will continue as the main cluster for automated processing. More news on CEP III will follow after the holidays. |
