Facilities - IT

ERI’s computational component is fundamental to the success of the research of the unit. The merge of the two founding units required the creation of a shared vision of computing that meets the goals of fostering collaborative and interdisciplinary research. As such, ERI established the following mission statement for the computing environment of the institute:

 

To provide an innovative and robust compute environment, which facilitates research, fosters collaboration among research groups, and assists in the technical training of students to further research of the Earth.

 

We aim to accomplish our mission through:

·       Maintaining a secure and reliable environment while providing remote access and flexible solutions to diverse needs.

·       Leveraging modern technologies to provide a scalable, economical, and sustainable high performance environment.

 

Research and Computing Facilities

The Institute's computational facility is a reflection of the features of the research unit itself: a unique, shared, and communal resource allowing interdisciplinary and collaborative research and training to flourish. The community computer resource enables students and faculty researchers to share not only hardware and software resources but also the data sets and specialized computer programs that are the core of the individual research projects. This sharing of intellectual achievements enables institute researchers to easily make new and important Earth system science and integrated assessment discoveries while sharing results quickly with the wider community, which provides a truly interdisciplinary environment in which to train students.

The Institute supports:

  • ≈117 UNIX systems (CentOS, Solaris, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, ...) - ≈65 hardware, ≈52 virtual machines (VMs)
  • ≈120 Macs
  • ≈50 Windows PCs
  • 4 Windows Servers
  • 23 managed network switches
  • 8 networked printers - 7 color, 1 monochrome
  • 2 "Fat-Node" SMP HPC systems totaling 80 cores.
  • ~1.06 Pb of disk storage
  • ~130 Websites - including 63 CMS (Drupal, MediaWiki, Wordpress)
  • 93+ databases (mysql + sqlite)
  • Conference Facilities - 2 projectors, 70" HDMI display, Teleconferencing phone

Networking

The research unit has a 1000Mb/s connection from the UCSB campus backbone to server rooms in Girvetz and Ellison Hall. This provides shared access to a 622Mb/s CALREN-2 connection, which in turn provides access to Internet2. High speed layer two switches and WAPs provide Ethernet, Fast-Ethernet, Gigabit-Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity. The Institute's network spans 3 class C subnets and extends to several campus locations via VLAN tagging and additional small subnet allocations across the campus backbone. Locations include: Ellison Hall, Webb Hall, Girvetz Hall, Bren and Harder Stadium.

ERI IT staff manages a wireless network on the 6th floor of Ellison with 5 WAPs and also helps manage a research VPN allowing communication with remote field observatories.

Environment

The computing environment is based on a network of primarily Linux-based (x86) hardware but also includes a handful of Sun Microsystems (SPARC and x86) servers.

The computing environment's architecture is designed to permit rapid deployment and easy integration of new hardware. Virtual systems based on the open source KVM and Xen projects are also available to institute researchers providing rapid, inexpensive, flexible and reliable resources. Vast datasets of MODIS, TM, AVHRR, to name just a few, are readily available on-line to all researchers at the Institute as are the tools and software for modeling and other modalities of scientific analysis.

ERI Storage Services provides researchers w/ access to online disk storage and automated backups on a pay for usage basis. This provides flexible and economical digital storage where the user pays only for what they use with easy access.

High-Performance Computing

Two "Fat Node" linux systems are available to all ERI researchers. "Hammer" has 48 2.1GHz AMD CPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 7TB of local scratch disk. "Tong" has 32 2.2GHz Intel CPU cores, 256GB of RAM and 8TB of local scratch disk. Both have queuing systems installed and access to scientific computing software as well as over 750TB of NFS networked storage on the various disk servers at ERI.

ERI IT staff is also available to assist users in gaining access to larger on and off campus computing resources.

Desktop Computing

Windows and Mac systems predominate desktops, which integrate with the general computing environment. High-performance and inexpensive SATA based RAID disk arrays allow participants to add disk storage to the environment. Nightly backups to off-site RAID arrays minimizes the risk of critical data loss. ERI hosts networked printers including color laser printers. A full compliment of computational, image processing, statistical, database, graphical, scientific visualization, and animation software are available for use by our researchers.

Desktop backups are provided using BackupPC, a free and opensource product which provides data compression and data duplication to minimize space costs. Management and restores are accomplished via a web interface.