Initiatives
Shared HPC resource for the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
ATLAS is the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences shared High Performance Computing resource. The goal of ATLAS is to provide an HPC resource for the current and future needs of EAS.
Based on commodity components, the ATLAS system will be expandable by addition of nodes, networking, and file storage.
Due to cooling and electrical concerns, it was no longer possible to support many single user machines. This cluster represents a new chapter in EAS computing, one of shared resources and collaboration.
Virtual Desktop Computing
High productivity computing will be embraced for lab, desktop, and mobile computing. EAS will move from providing desktop systems to students, visitors, and faculty; choosing to maintain backend servers. This allows personal machines to be used with institute or EAS licensed software and fosters pervasive computing
EAS has partnered with the College of Engineering's virtualization project to provide virtualization services. We are deploying state of the art servers with GPU's to provide graphics capabilities to those graphics intensive workloads. Students will be able to access computers from thin clients / desktops provided in the labs and offices, or via their own notebook computers. All processing will take place on EAS servers located within the College of Engineering's server farm.
Printer Consolidation
EAS continues to enhance a centralized printing model. We have moved from over fifty printers to 6 department printers, utilizing print job tracking.
Embracing Multimedia
EAS is in the processing of implementing a new web site. The current site has been available since 2008, and is being updated to better showcase our research areas and improve navigation to information.
Our building atrium has been enhanced with new digital signage. Located by the main entrance, the monitor will display information about events, faculty, classes, and general EAS information.
Facebook will be tied in with our web presence to reach out to current and perspective students. This provides an opportunity for comment as well.
Software Licensing
EAS is moving from a standalone licensing model to a group / site license model for most of the software in use. This will allow for concurrency usage, which will facilitate system builds by using common images, as well as provide the ability to use the software on a greater number of computers.
Disk Imaging
EAS is implementing a storage facility to image desktop and lab computers. This will facilitate rapid deployment of new system disks in case of failure, and will provide for image testing and updating. Common images for lab and student computers will facilitate deployments, which will also be handled by this system.
