October 15th, 2004 by Dana Roode
UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment (EEE) includes several new enhancements to the Class Mailing List and Mailing List Editor tools.
The Class Mailing List tool provides instructors with an automatically generated, near real-time list, that contains e-mail addresses for all students enrolled in a class. The Mailing List Editor allows instructors to configure their list, add alternate e-mail addresses, add extra e-mail addresses and make other changes.
Previously, instructors would have to wait 24 hours for updates to their Class Mailing List. Now a Class Mailing List reflects adds or drops in just 2 hours. Additions of TAs and other assistants now occur immediately. Other improvements to the Class Mailing List and Editor include:
- All e-mail is virus scanned
- Targeted error messages to aid in self-troubleshooting
- Faster response and delivery
- New and improved Mailing List Archive look
- Quarterly Announcement e-mails have been consolidated. Instructors will get one e-mail with all available list addresses (Classes associated later will result in a subsequent e-mail)
The EEE Web development team continues to improve the system based on feedback from students and instructors. For more information on new and upcoming features, see http://eee.uci.edu/news.
October 15th, 2004 by Dana Roode
UCI’s Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF) offers accounts to all UCI researchers and students interested in High Performance Computing. The ESMF presently consists of a cluster of 88 IBM Power4 CPUs in seven 8-way and one 32-way SMP nodes running AIX 5.1L. The Visual Age compilers fully support OpenMP and MPI. The computational environment is batch-oriented and is suitable for large- scale numerical simulations. The environment is similar to that found at many national supercomputer centers, but, we hope, with less bureaucracy. Instructions for obtaining an ESMF account are at
http://www.ess.uci.edu/esmf/accounts.html
Idle ESMF CPU time is a waste and the goal is to minimize it. We have constructed a batch queue environment which gives priority to the earth-systems simulations which are its primary task, and places other jobs in queues of lower priority (standby queues). This allows other UCI researchers to benefit from idle CPU time without penalizing ESMF’s core users.
October 15th, 2004 by Dana Roode
Brian Chrisman
In 2002, Network and Academic Computing Services (NACS) created the Radio Systems Specialist position, in order to better serve our clients. The new position consolidated management of the 800MHz radio system and cellular carriers’ cell sites on campus, responsibilities which at that time were shared among several NACS staff. Brian Chrisman was hired to fill the new position.
Brian was previously employed by the Motorola vendor that maintains the radio infrastructure on campus. He was able to transition into the new position quickly because of prior experience with UCI’s 800MHz radio system.
Brian has diverse responsibilities, but some key ones are:
- 800 MHz radio system administration, vendor coordination, performance analysis, and system maintenance/upgrades.
- Customer service, analysis of campus radio needs for daily operations and emergency use, communications consulting, and radio training for campus departments.
- Assessment of need for additional cell sites on campus with campus administration. Coordination with all responsible parties for planning and construction of sites.
Brian Chrisman is available on campus Monday through Friday. He can be reached at (949) 824-8151 or bchrisma@uci.edu for assistance with campus radio communications.
Please visit the radio area on the NACS web page at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/network/ for additional information.