Archive for the 'System Administration' 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.
July 27th, 2007 by Francisco Lopez
If you own and use a single Unix or Windows workstation, the effort required for system administration (maintenance, security, software licensing, and user support) is usually not an unreasonable burden. But if you have a group of systems, this can drain precious resources away from your research or other duties.
NACS Distributed Computing Support (DCS) now offers a cost-effective alternative. DCS can help you acquire, set up, configure, and maintain a client/server environment based on SunRay™ workstations instead of individual computers.
SunRay™ workstations are “smart terminals” which boot off the network, and then behave just as if they were independent Unix or Windows workstations. The SunRay™ client machines have jacks for connecting keyboard, mouse, display, and USB devices, as well as local memory, but leave everything else to the server.
The operating system (Windows or Unix), and all the application software your users need are installed on a single server. One copy is much easier and cheaper to keep up to date, and when new applications are needed, installing once is much faster than managing multiple independent workstations. (You still need to be sure you are licensed to run as many copies of the software as you need.)
This service may be of particular interest to people responsible for setting up and maintaining instructional labs, or researchers who oversee a large number of graduate students to whom you supply computers. If you are interested in exploring whether this technology can help you, contact NACS.
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.
July 16th, 2004 by Dana Roode
NACS is upgrading both its infrastructure and its clients’ Red Hat servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3.
This operating system is available in two flavors, Advanced Server (AS) and Workstation (WS). The key difference between the two versions is that WS is not designed for use in server environments; therefore, it does not support more than 2 processors, nor does it include various server packages.
For an annual subscription fee of $50 (AS) or $25 (WS), users are provided with access to the Red Hat Network, including patches and updates. For a small additional fee, departments can subscribe to this service through NACS and receive these benefits:
- Patch and update services provided by our on-campus server, resulting in much faster performance.
- License and release tracking, saving you paperwork and bureaucratic headaches.
- Automatic patches and updates installed as they become available.
Systems administered by NACS also receive these benefits. Please contact dcs@uci.edu for pricing and additional information.
Any DCSLIB subscriber upgrading to RHEL should install the Legacy Software Development package to maintain binary compatibility with the current Red Hat archive.
More information about RHEL can be found at: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/
Redhat also publishes a commodity version of Linux called Fedora. Fedora is available for free, but has much more limited support. A comparison may be found athttp://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
Support for the current version of Red Hat Linux ended on April 30, 2004.
August 29th, 2003 by Dana Roode
NACS Distributed Computing Support (DCS) provides a full range of UNIX system administration services for UCI research and other computing environments on a contract basis.
DCS staff members provide direct Unix system administration services for some computer systems. They also serve as consultants to departmental system administrators.
DCS staff keep abreast of emerging applications and system technologies as well as the latest security fixes in order to provide high quality system support.
System support also includes remote monitoring and proactive trouble resolution. In fact, problems are often diagnosed and resolved before departments are even aware of any problems!
The various staff members of DCS bring a mix of people skills and technical skills to bear. Some staff read, “triage” and respond to the daily influx of phone and e-mail inquiries from clients and trouble reports generated by computer systems. Other staff ensure that security fixes and system upgrades are distributed and installed as promptly as possible.
The broad range of services and professional level of support provided by DCS usually matches and frequently surpasses those offered in the private sector.