Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

You are here: Home / Archives for Research Support

Research Support

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Migration

by

Windows Vista Logo

Windows Vista Logo

Microsoft has released new editions of its Windows operating system, Vista, as well as its productivity suites Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Macintosh.  Here is some information NACS has collected to help users and departments adapt to and make optimal use of these new tools.

In the summer of 2007, NACS coordinated a series of workshops, partly funded by a grant from Microsoft.  We are currently planning the next series of workshops.

NACS works with its counterparts at other UC campuses to be sure UCI faculty and staff have access to advantageous licensing programs, including UC-MCCA (the Microsoft Consolidated Campus Agreement).

We have introduced Vista and Office 2007 in the AIRB training lab, and will expand their availability as demand grows.

NACS and departmental computing support staff can assist faculty and staff deciding when (or whether) to migrate to Vista and Office 2007. Vista requires a higher-performance system to run effectively, and Office 2007 and 2008 introduce new file formats that are incompatible with earlier versions.  Office 2007 and 2008 offer the option to save files in a backward-compatible format, and users of earlier versions of Office can download the free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Windows Vista runs most software well, but some specialized research or administrative tools won’t run under Vista. NACS recommends purchasers of Vista systems plan to test their most important applications in advance of purchase.

Today, all new PC purchases running Windows come with Vista licenses.  If running Windows XP is important to you, choose a business-class system from a reseller like Dell or HP, and select a Windows XP configuration.  The University’s strategic sourcing reseller, KST Data, offers a variety of systems preconfigured with Windows XP Professional.  Be aware that obtaining the correct XP drivers for hardware designed for Vista may be problematic.

Microsoft last released a service pack (a collection of software updates) for Windows XP in May, and therefore by Microsoft policy, XP will be supported until at least May 2009.  However, Microsoft has not committed to supporting or retiring XP beyond that date.  Interested users can follow Microsoft’s evolving plans for XP at the Windows Service Pack Road Map web site.

GIS Technology in UCI Research

by

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a technology which is finding ever broader use in the UCI research community. NACS Research Computing Specialist Tony Soeller has been supporting GIS software, teaching workshops, and working directly with faculty and graduate students on research projects to exploit GIS tools. Here are some recent examples.

Professor Bradford Hawkins in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is tracking global species diversity in birds. GIS was used on a massive spatial data synthesis project on global bird ranges to georegister, digitize and rasterize bird range maps, then to summarize the number of bird species within discrete cells 27.5 to 220 km on a side. Numerous ArcGIS programs (ArcObjects and VBA) were written to help in the processing of the data.

Cristiane Surbeck completed her Ph.D. studies in Professor Stan Grant’s lab in Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi. Cris has been analyzing the Santa Ana River Watershed. Her research looked at the biological and sediment constituents of runoff into the Santa Ana River from three storm events within the watershed, and compared these data to rainfall volume and land use types which contributed to the runoff. GIS was used to synthesize land use data with rainfall data from the storm events, to delineate individual storm watersheds, and to determine the area of land within each land use type and the amount of precipitation within each of those land use types.

Satish Vutuku, a student in Professor Donald Dabdub’s lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is examining the impact on air quality of distributed power generation.

In one project, Satish assessed atmospheric impact of emissions from distributed power generation (DG) sources. DG refers to “on-site” generation of power using technologies such as fuel cells and micro turbines. Such DG installations emit pollutants in an urban area in a highly dispersed manner, in contrast to conventional huge power plants that emit pollutants as a concentrated plume far away from urban areas. In order to analyze effects of such DG emissions, Satish created a set of “DG scenarios” that would predict the adoption of DG technologies and corresponding emissions. The development of DG scenarios was based upon highly-detailed land-use data and population data. The land-use data were obtained as GIS files and were formatted to fit the model grid and resolution with help from Tony Soeller.
This is just a sampling of the many projects at UCI which are making use of GIS software and Tony’s expertise. Please contact NACS if you would be interested in exploring the relevance of GIS to your research project.

NACS to Host CENIC Emergency Backup Center at UCI

by

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) administers and supports the CalREN network, which UCI depends on for our connection to the commodity Internet and Project Abilene, the nation-wide Internet2 network. CENIC has selected NACS to host their disaster/recovery backup network operations center (NOC). NACS will provide space for CENIC staff and equipment, and will provide network connectivity and voice over IP (VOIP) phone service.

In the event of an incident at their primary NOC, the backup NOC will be activated at UCI and will stay in operation for up to 90 days. Users of the CalREN network include the California K-12 system, the California Community College system, the University of California system, the California State University system, the University of Southern California, Stanford University and the Information Sciences Institute to name a few. To get more information about CENIC or CalREN you can go to www.cenic.org

Mac Cluster Available

by

Apple has donated to UCI a small computational cluster based on its XServe product line.

This three-server cluster (two computational nodes and one control or “head” node) is built on the PowerPC chip. Each node features two 2Ghz PPC CPUs. The cluster also offers a 1.2Tb (1200 Gigabytes) disk array. The PowerPC architecture features high-performance true 64-bit floating point arithmetic, and is particularly well-suited for floating point and vector calculations.

Originally, NACS and faculty evaluated batch processing systems for the cluster under the Macintosh OS X operating system. Currently the cluster is running Linux, because faculty tend to be more familiar with that operating system, and to take advantage of the richer software development environment available under Linux.

GNU compilers for C, C++, and Fortran are available on the cluster, as well as the optimized IBM C/C++ compiler suite for PowerPC. Faculty may contact NACS for accounts, assistance with porting, and benchmarking.

Cluster Computing

by

NACS hosts and manages the Middle Performance Computing (MPC) “Beowulf” Cluster on behalf of campus researchers who need substantial computational power.

MPC comprises private nodes and shared nodes, including a part-time shared cluster using NACS PC lab systems. MPC systems feature a mix of architectures to provide high computational throughput.

A feature of the MPC service is the opportunity for researchers to join their own systems to the cluster. In exchange for system administration, housing, and 24/7 oversight provided by NACS, researchers allow 25% of their systems to be configured as part of a campus computational resource. (The remaining 75% is configured to be a cluster, or “queue”, dedicated to the owner.) Contributors may, of course, make use of systems designated for campus use.

Contributors also become voting members of the MPC Advisory Board. The purpose of the MPCAB is to advise NACS on the governance, policies, procedures, and technical aspects of the MPC cluster.

Researchers may request accounts on MPC (and other NACS resources) online. Any future changes that impact MPC users will be posted on the MPC website.

NACS also hosts the GradEA Beowulf Cluster for the exclusive use of UCI graduate students.

MPC web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/mpc/

MPC account requests:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/rcs/resources.html

GradEA web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/gradea/