Newsletter
| Welcome | 2008-2 |
Welcome to a slightly delayed quarterly newsletter from the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV). The spring has been a very busy time for us, as you will see below.
Below, there is a number of exiting new CCV-related developments, originating both in CCV, and the support we offer for research and learning. Also included is more general information that may well impact CCV and the way in which we operate.
I will again encourage you to contact me with examples that display work, which directly or indirectly, relies on the CCV facilities and staff expertise. The CCV Newsletter is also an outlet for this, and I will make an effort to highlight as many of these activities to the Brown community as possible.
CCV moving to 94 Waterman Street
After many successful years working from the current 382 Brook Street offices, the CCV staff will be relocating to 94 Waterman St over the summer. This location is more centrally located to the campus, and is better equipped to address the needs of the CCV staff and its associates. The staff will be located on the second floor of this beautiful old building, and a plan is under way to transform the basement into a facility for development, instruction, and advanced video conferencing as well as development space for visualization and computing initiatives.
We look forward to welcoming you to our new space at the beginning of the fall semester. More news on this topic to come later!
Guidelines for user support and Remedy
CCV began using the Remedy Help Desk application earlier this year in effort to monitor and address all user support requests. This system has been successfully used for several years by CIS and Bio Med, providing them with a mechanism to monitor and track support requests.
I would encourage all of you to submit all requests for support via email to support@ccv.brown.edu . Please refrain from contacting individual staff members directly, as this could potentially cause a delay in service. All requests will be entered into the Remedy Ticketing System, hence creating a unique help desk number. This system will enable us to track requests more efficiently, and will provide an improved response time to our end users.
To better serve our users, we have developed a set of guidelines for support and help desk assistance. The guidelines can be found at:
http://www.ccv.brown.edu/events/helpdeskpolicy.html
As always, I encourage you to send any comments or suggestions that you feel would help us to further improve on these important service aspects. It is CCV's mission to provide the highest quality of support for research computing across campus.
Increased and expanded funding for CCV use
The Director of CCV has, at his discretion, a small research fund to directly support and enable the use of CCV facilities. The purpose of the fund is to offset the initial cost of using the CCV facilities, and to enable work and development of efforts utilizing CCV facilities, e.g.; large scale computing efforts using the parallel clusters, manipulation and analysis of large datasets using the Lustre filesystem, use of the immersive Cave or PowerWall visualization facilities, etc.
Until recently, these funds were restricted to be used as seed funds only. However, with the support of the Office of the Vice President of Research and the Provost, their allowable use has now been expanded to include three different situations:
Seed funds
This is to support the use of the CCV facilities for up to 12 months with the expectation that alternative sources of funding will be sought subsequently to continue the effort.
The seed awards are non renewable after a 12 months period, and the proposal must discuss alternative sources for support.
Bridge funds
This is to support the continued use of the CCV facilities for up to 12 months with the expectation that alternative sources of funding will again be secured to continue the effort. The bridge funding allows researchers to continue their research activities through CCV during intermittent periods of less funding.
The bridge awards are non renewable after a 12 month period, and the proposal must discuss alternative sources for support.
Continued funds
This enables the funding of research activities for which there is no viable alternative source of funding or other means by which to enable access to the facilities.
The continued funds are renewable, but require a proposal review every 12 months. For proposals for funding beyond the first 12 months, it is required that some evidence for alternative sources of support has been pursued during the past period of support.
For more detailed information, please contact the Director of CCV, Jan S. Hesthaven (Jan.Hesthaven@Brown.edu).
Improved backup and archival for research data available
CCV’s new backup and archival server is now online and is already serving numerous communities across campus. The service is highly flexible and is adapted to the individual needs of the researchers and research groups.
Detailed information about this essential service is available at:
http://www.ccv.brown.edu/events/backupservices.html
CCV involved in the development of IT strategic plan, and the planning of the future of research computing at Brown
As some of you are aware, the new CIO and VP of CIS, Mike Pickett, has initiated a large effort to develop a five year plan for IT at Brown. As one should expect, CCV staff has played a central role in this development from the very beginning, and several documents are now available online as part of the effort.
If you are interested in following the progress, and provided input for the first draft of the IT strategic plan, I would suggest that you take a look at (Brown ID login required):
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/itstrategicplan/Home
Among the attachments you will find both the first draft of the IT strategic plan and the complete reports for the different working groups, among them, the one focusing on research computing and support.
Since the process is still ongoing, I would greatly appreciate any thoughts and ideas you may have concerning these very important matters for CCV and the university in general. Please forward any such suggestions and ideas to me at Jan.Hesthaven@Brown.edu
George Loriot retired from CCV (again).
As many of you know, George Loriot has played an important role for CCV during the last decade, and he has been involved in many research efforts and exciting initiatives across campus.
Although George officially retired from CCV in late 2006, we quickly realized that his departure left CCV with a void, and managed to convince him to come back as a part time consultant. However, the time has now come to allow George to pursue his many other interests.
It is with mixed feelings that I announce George’s retirement (again) as of June 30, 2008. We are (again) left with a void that will be hard to fill.
Please join me in thanking George for his many years of consistent contributions to CCV and to research computing at Brown in general. He will be sorely missed.
Improved computing hardware online though CCV
As mentioned in the last newsletter (2008-1), the CCV Associate Director, Sam Fulcomer, recently won an 8-node, 64-core, 756 GFlop cluster, based on Intel’s newest chip technology. This cluster has a high-performance Infiniband interconnect, and is now available to CCV users for benchmarking and for applications they can share in Brown/Intel PR materials and press announcements. Any CCV user who is interested in using and/or experimenting with this state-of-the-art computing platform should contact Sam Fulcomer (Samuel_Fulcomer@Brown.edu).
Based on a generous donation by Professors Karniadakis and Maxey, both in Applied Mathematics, we have also recently added, a 32-node Intel Xeon Linux cluster to the public domain of machines. The machine has 2 GB memory and a Myrinet Interconnect and is available to any CCV user as part of the public machines.
CCV hosts staff development day on June 4th, 2008
As in past years, CCV will participate in the annual staff development day on June 4th, 2008, from 10:15am-11:30 at our facilities located at 180 George Street. If you or your staff has not had the opportunity to see some of our work, please contact Sharon King (Sharon_King@Brown.edu) to see if there are openings available.
Best wishes for a productive and enjoyable summer,
Jan S Hesthaven
Director of CCV
Jan.Hesthaven@Brown.edu