Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

Work Toward UCPath Continues

by

UCPath (an acronym derived from “UC Payroll, Academic Personnel, Timekeeping, and Human Resources”) is the University of California’s project to deploy a single payroll and human resources system across all 10 campuses, five medical centers and the Office of the President. The new UCPath system is expected to meet the core needs of each location while capturing the efficiencies, improved data and cost-savings associated with unified systems. The UCPath Center is the new shared service center that will be used by all employees to access payroll and benefits information.

Penny White, director of Administrative Policies & Records in Administrative and Business Services, agreed to take on the role of UCPath Project Manager effective November 1, 2012. In this role, Penny is responsible for ensuring that UC Irvine successfully transitions to the new systemwide human resources and payroll system on time, and that the campus and UC Irvine Medical Center are ready to transition to the UCPath Center, the systemwide shared service center.

Currently, UCI is projected to convert to UCPath in October, 2014.  Work has already begun in many areas to meet this goal:

  • Analyzing the UCPath design documentation to determine the changes that will be required for existing UCI applications that support Payroll, Human Resources, and Accounting business processes
  • Designing improved tools for campus users including a data warehouse that will provide filtering, grouping, and labeling functionality to simplify production of sophisticated reports
  • Collaboration among UC Path, campus, and UCIMC teams on data warehouse and data distribution plans
  • Meeting with campus stakeholders to determine system migration impact

OIT will publish periodic updates as work on this major initiative advances.

Windows 8 Is Here

by

Microsoft released the latest version of its Windows operating system, Windows 8 (Win8), last fall.  New computers are shipping with Win8, and devices are being developed which will exploit new features of Win8.

Win8 introduces a new user interface (UI) called the Modern UI with a diverse collection of tools and utilities, and which is designed to work well with touch-screen devices such as tablets and phones.  Win8 also includes the Desktop UI which is similar to the Windows 7 UI and supports all Windows 7 apps, such as Microsoft Office. Win8 features enhanced support for cloud computing and a new app store called the Microsoft Store.

Should you use Windows 8?

Check with your local computing support office for its recommendation. Whether you should use Win8 for university work depends on a number of factors, including the extent to which Win8 is supported within your department. As with any new operating system, verify that existing software and peripherals will work with Win8.

More information on Windows 8, including licensing options and links to official information from Microsoft, can be found on OIT’s Windows 8 page.

In Brief December 2012

by

latest news

  • The Office of Strategic Communications and OIT are pleased to announce the release of a new Web search engine. “UC Irvine Search” can be accessed from the campus homepage at http://www.uci.edu.
  • The scheduled move of equipment from the Law Building Data Center to the OIT Data Center went very well, and the problems with emergency power have now been resolved.
  • Improved email infrastructure has made possible an upgrade to the Student Electronic Broadcast System (SEBS) which provides bulk email of messages to students.  Whereas delivery in the past has been queued for after-hours processing, messages are now processed as soon as they are received.
  • During the campus holiday closure, December 24 – January 1, the OIT Help Desk (824-2222) will remain available for urgent support issues, but with limited staffing and potentially longer resolution times.

Recruiting Top Students with Intelliworks

by

Data Center

UCI seeks to enroll the best students, while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to a diverse student body. Enrollment Services invests considerable effort and expense every year in identifying and encouraging high school students to consider us for their college career.  UCI doesn’t lack for applicants; the approximately 4,500 new freshmen who enrolled for the Fall 2012 term were selected from a pool of 65,000+ applicants. Appealing to the best students, as well as those whose goals align well with UCI’s strengths, and those who represent a variety of backgrounds and interests requires a lot of data collection, analysis, and management. Combine this with the fact that colleges and universities across the country are all aggressively recruiting the same caliber of students from the same pools, and the task of identifying, recruiting, and enrolling the best of the best becomes extraordinarily complex and competitive.

Early in 2011, the Office of Admissions & Relations with Schools realized that maintaining UCI’s high entrance standards while going up against some of the best recruiters in the business would require something more than business as usual. As a result, Admissions launched a project in collaboration with OIT to implement a state-of-the-art constituent relationship management (CRM) system to help stay competitive. Admissions eventually selected Intelliworks CRM as the system of choice for this essential mission.

Intelliworks not only allows for the collection and reporting of key information, but it also allows Admissions to automate much of the routine work (e.g., responding to interest inquiries, prompting for follow up activities, managing bulk email campaigns, etc.). This, in turn, frees up valuable resources within Admissions to provide key face-to-face contact and other personal touches with prospective students and their parents.

The transition from a manual system based on emails, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and hallway conversations to an automated state-of-the-art CRM has not been without its challenges, but the payoff of being able to more accurately target UCI’s message, more carefully manage the recruiting cycle, and capitalize on opportunities to recruit the type of student UCI wants at any particular time, is already paying big dividends.

High Performance Computing Cluster

by

Data Center

OIT has been providing cooperative cluster computing services to UCI researchers for many years.  Comprising at various times MPC (“Medium Performance Computing”), BDUC (“Broadcom Distributed and Unified Cluster”), and even Green Planet (a cluster hosted for the School of Physical Sciences), the service continues to evolve as technology changes.

With the support of Southern California Edison’s Strategic Energy Program (SEP) which offers grants to replace older computers with new, energy-efficient systems (something of a “cash for clunkers” for computers), along with contributions from the Office of Research, OIT has been able to upgrade some of the components of the shared-use computing cluster and has rechristened it HPC (“High Performance Computing.”)  Further upgrades will take place over the coming year.

With MPC, individual researchers could add computing nodes to the cluster with the understanding that, in exchange for OIT providing environment and security, 25% of the computing capacity would be made available to the UCI research community.  In contrast, HPC uses advanced queuing and scheduling techniques developed by HPC system administrator Joseph Farran.  These techniques dynamically allow unused capacity in a given researcher’s segment of the cluster to be made available to others.  This results in a sustained use of over 90% of the massive computational capacity of the cluster.  Researchers interested in participating in HPC should contact Joseph Farran at x4-5551.

Technical specifications of the upgraded nodes include:

  • 64-core AMD CPUs providing an aggregate of over 2000 cores
  • 8 Nvidia GPUs (4 Tesla, 4 Fermi)
  • 8.8TB RAM
  • QDR Infiniband inter-node communication channel
  • 500TB storage in a Gluster distributed filesystem
  • GridEngine scheduler via 18 private/group queues and 9 free queues
  • CUDA development tools
  • licensed software including SAS, STATA, CLCBio, MATLAB, Mathematica
  • GNU, Intel and PGC compilers and Eclipse and Totalview debuggers