Archive for the 'Academic Data Center' Category
July 22nd, 2009 by Francisco Lopez
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ZotPortal
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.
July 22nd, 2009 by Francisco Lopez
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Greenplanet
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.
April 24th, 2009 by Allen Schiano
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Mirrored Servers
NACS and AdCom have jointly developed a network infrastructure for units with mission-critical computing services. “DMRnet” (short for “Dual Modular Redundant Network”) allows you to create twin servers and to locate them separately in the NACS and AdCom Data Centers.
With this arrangement, an interruption in service (power, network, etc.) at one physical location can automatically transfer services (fail over) to the server in the other location. Users of your critical services will see no interruption.
DMRnet was designed and developed in response to the need to have UCI’s main web site, www.uci.edu, continuously available. The upcoming Student Portal will be the latest client of the DMRnet system.
NACS staff are available to consult with interested departments on the options, cost, and fitness of DMRnet for your particular need. DMRnet is intended only for the most critical campus services.
August 4th, 2006 by Lyle Wiedeman
Recent announcements by earthquake scientists and the US Geological Survey indicate that Southern California is due for a major earthquake in the next 30 years. That along with other data suggests that there’s as much as a 30-50% chance of major shaking affecting the UCI campus in the next 10 years.
NACS has studied the likely effect of such a quake on central computing systems and data stores in our Engineering Gateway Academic Data Center (ADC). Aside from the obvious scenarios, like computer racks falling over or the raised floor collapsing under the strain of holding two very large UPSes, we discovered that disk drives housing critical campus data (e.g., our campus e-mail services) are susceptible to damage in such an event and possibly in a milder quake.
To mitigate the risk of serious data loss, NACS has followed the lead of the UCSD ADC and purchased and installed ‘Isobase’ rack isolation equipment. This equipment was installed during the June 24th scheduled service outage. Similar to base isolation technology used on modern high rise and freeway overpasses, ‘Isobase’ places computer racks on essentially a shock-absorber surface. Six racks which house NACS’s e-mail, calendaring, EEE, and other critical campus services were installed on this base. We plan to purchase bases for our remaining systems in the ADC as funds become available.
If you have any interest in this equipment or what steps you can take to protect computers and disks from seismic events please contact NACS. NACS also has a service for hosting your equipment in our ADC.
October 21st, 2005 by Dana Roode
There are many ways for departments and researchers to create and maintain Web sites at UCI. NACS has one solution which affordably meets a variety of potential needs.
NACS offers a Linux-based service which provides the Apache server, MySQL for simple databases, and programming in Perl, PHP, and Python. Subscribers are given 1 GB of storage space and shell access to the web server via SSH to setup content for their Web site. NACS provides server maintenance, system administration, file system backups, and web server configuration.
NACS also offers the standard Microsoft web suite of IIS and ASP on a Windows Server.
If you want help creating content, NACS can work with you to design and develop your site, or to enhance an existing site. An initial consultation will be needed to define the scope of the work and to provide a estimate of the time required to complete the project.
If you have a server and want a 24-hour supervised, secure, climate controlled environment in which to house it, NACS can host web servers in ourAcademic Data Center.
Additional services will be offered either as a standard hourly rate or a flat monthly charge depending on the nature of the services being requested. Seehttp://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/webhost.html for more information.
These services can be combined or provided independently of each other. Please contact us to discuss your specific needs or any questions you may have.
August 1st, 2001 by Dana Roode
Many departments are finding their daily tasks have grown dependent on one or more central computers, called “servers.” Sometimes it is a file server, which stores shared documents and data; other times it is a web server, which is responsible for presenting your department and its mission to the world.
You may find that the responsibility for housing, maintaining, and securing that server is a distraction from your core mission. Hence, NACS has inaugurated a “co-location” service, where we house, secure, and oversee your computer so you can get back to work. Costs vary depending on the combination of services which meets your needs.
NACS has a room ideal for housing computers: it is climate controlled, insulated from electrical fluctuations, and supervised 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you would like to explore the opportunity to delegate some or all of the responsibility for physically protecting your key servers, ensuring network security, or maintaining the operating system, call NACS.