In general, the hardware procurement/operations team is participating
in the prototype farm deployment. We are also working issues on 
procurement and acceptance testing. 

Current areas of work: dealing with large disks, NFS service across
a cluster, product/I/O server configuration, GB ethernet interface
troubles, and other general resolution of problems uncovered in the
prototype.

My guess is that this effort will expand to include benchmark
development and file system testing and bump up to about 2 FTEs
by January. I think the experience with Comark taught us that we
have to work the Linux vendor issues "continuously" and 
thoroughly. We will be meeting with Procurement soon to discuss
issues about problems with orders, vendor (dis)qualification
procedures, substitution of parts, etc. Finally, we need to
start discussions with the experiments about the requirements
(hardware and software) for the farm.

dane