Information Technology News

Information and Academic Technologies

On June 22, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Gottfredson announced his decision to consolidate UCI Information Technology (IT) organizations in non-academic areas.

Effective July 1, Administrative Computing Services (AdCom),  Network and Academic Computing Services (NACS), Office of Academic Affairs Computing Services (OAACS), and Office of Research IT are joining forces as a new organization, Information and Academic Technologies (IAT). The motivation and goals for consolidation are described in the report of the Academic Senior Managers “Big Ideas” IT Workgroup.

Effective integration of IT activities takes time and will be implemented incrementally over coming months. For the present, everything about contacting and working with AdCom, NACS, OAACS, and Office of Research IT remains the same. Please continue to work with your current contacts in these organizations and rely on the appropriate help-desks, as you have done in the past. Our goal is to minimize disruption from IT consolidation activities and we intend to maintain current project schedules and commitments.

With this issue, NACS News becomes IAT News, as part of the ongoing consolidation activity.  IAT news and the iat.uci.edu web sites will be important vehicles to keep you abreast of consolidation progress in the coming months.

ReadyTalk: New Option for Teleconferencing

Conference calls are an economical way to meet with people, both on and off campus. They are an easy, effective way of cutting travel time and expenses, allowing participants to work from their own offices or wherever they can be most productive.

Web conferencing combines telephone conference calls with the use of a Web browser to share viewing of presentations and documents. By allowing all conference participants to view the same thing at the same time, web conferences can improve discussions, presentations, and explanations. Questions and answers are simpler and easier.

UC has signed a system-wide agreement with ReadyTalk to provide teleconferencing services to UC campuses.  Service options include inexpensive, reservationless conference calling, as well as higher-end operator-assisted conference calls.  Both kinds allow Web conferencing at no additional cost.

IAT-NACS has preapared a quick how-to guide for use of ReadyTalk conferencing services.  Individuals and departments who wish to take advantage of this new option can call ReadyTalk directly, and pay for the service with the UCI PALcard.

ZotPortal: Online Resources for Students

After an extensive campus-wide planning process, the student portal “ZotPortal” went live on April 27 of this year.  IAT-NACS worked with Student Affairs to design the high-reliability and high-performance system hardware, and provides ongoing network and system administration services, as well as housing elements of ZotPortal in separate data centers.

Through ZotPortal students can access academic and administrative information, connect to a Facebook account, subscribe to UCI campus news, student media and entertainment feeds, check UCI libraries catalogue and even search for people and campus web sites from one search box.

Students can arrange ZotPortal’s look and layout flexibly through a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, subscribing to the particular information channels they want.

ZotPortal runs on hardware intended to provide maximal service continuity.  There are duplicate servers, connected through IAT’s DMRnet.  In the event one server becomes unavailable (say due to a power failure), the twin automatically assumes all portal activity.  Within each physical server are many CPUs, configured to provide a flexible group of virtual servers so that ZotPortal can support very large numbers of simultaneous requests.  Data is stored on a disk cluster configured with Sun’s ZFS (zettabyte file system) which provides both redundancy (data protection) and high performance parallel access.

Thunderbird Rolls Out in A&BS

IAT-AdCom has recently completed the process of helping UCI administrative departments migrate to a new email service structure.  12 departments and 570 users have been assisted in this process since January.

The migration involved three changes, each intended to improve email service to affected users.  The most obvious change was moving from Eudora, a program that is no longer supported by its developer and has become increasingly error-prone and insecure, to Thunderbird.

However, behind this obvious change, users were also migrated from the POP protocol for email delivery to IMAP.  There are many advantages to IMAP, not least of which is the ability to see the same email messages from every computer, and even from Webmail.  IMAP also allows the server to tell the user when new mail has arrived, rather than the user creating an unnecessary workload for the server by polling it: “Is there new mail yet?  How about now?”

Finally, users were migrated to the campus’s main Enterprise Services email server, allowing for more cost-effective support, and providing better response time and more space for email storage.

Candidate users were given a choice of making the change themselves, using online self-help instructions, or waiting for their department’s turn and getting personal assistance.

While change is never easy, many people have already commented that the new system is an improvement.

Greenplanet: Cluster Computing for Physical Sciences

Physical Sciences, with support from IAT-NACS, has assembled a high-performance computing cluster for climate modeling and other computational-intensive research.

Called “Greenplanet,” the cluster comprises nodes purchased by faculty in Earth Systems Sciences (ESS), Chemistry, and Physics, and it is expected that Math faculty will also participate.  At this time, Greenplanet includes almost 900 CPUs and is still growing.

IAT provides secure, climate-controlled space in the Academic Data Center,  system administration services as a team with Physical Sciences IT staff, and consultation on code parallelization and optimization.

According to Assistant Professor Keith Moore of ESS, Greenplanet is “a flexible cluster, suitable for massively parallel complex computations (such as climate simulations), and for smaller-scale use on a single node as a workstation.”

A typical node features 8 64-bit Intel CPUs.  Greenplanet features the Load Sharing Facility (LSF) for job management and the Lustre caching file system for extremely high-performance access to the large datasets typical of climate modeling.  Two message passing techniques are available for parallel code: OpenMP for communication between CPUs on a node, and MPI for communication between CPUs on different nodes.  Greenplanet also has the high-performance Infiniband interlink between nodes for high-speed communications.  There is extensive instrumentation available for tuning jobs to optimal execution speed and use of all available computational capacity in the cluster.

Software includes the Climate Systems Modeling package, parallel Matlab, and quantum chemistry packages such as Gaussian and Turbomole.

UCI Identity and Access Management Website

IAT-NACS provides a suite of identity management, authentication, and authorization services collectively referred to as Identity and Access Management services. A group of web pages has been developed describing UCI network identities (e.g., UCInetIDs), how they work, and how they will evolve.  There is a wealth of information for those interested in technical details.  Here are some highlights.

The campus directory provides contact information for campus affiliates, and allows you to control certain information pertaining to your network presence on campus, such as the server your UCI email should be sent to.

UCInetIDs are network identities issued to campus affiliates.  With your UCInetID and password, you can access a variety of online services, many through WebAuth.  IAT has recently extended UCInetID authentication, with appropriate limits, to applicants for admission, and third parties for whom some services will be provided.

UC Trust is a system for using each campus’s network authentication system (UCInetIDs at UCI) to access services, as appropriate, provided by other UC campuses as well as some companies whose services are restricted to UC affiliates.

Because UCInetIDs are so vital to conducting University business, IAT has developed plans for enhancing UCInetID security.  Also, as the number of users, past and present, grows, it will be necessary to upgrade UCInetIDs beyond their current 8-character limit.  You can read about this project online as well.