- Physics-Departmental-Computing

[Fwd: FW: Imperial College and Wolfram Research - Mathematica Piracy]
by David Colling 23 Dec '09

23 Dec '09

Dear physics computing reps, The saga of the Mathematica continues (see below). I had a pretty low response to my emails about this in November so please take the time to respond this as I need these figures when college reopens. What I need to know is: 1. How many mathematica licenses your group needs 2. How many (shared and individual) mathematica licenses you believe that your group already has access to. All the best and Happy Christmas to all, david -------- Original Message -------- Subject: FW: Imperial College and Wolfram Research - Mathematica Piracy Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:19:05 +0000 From: Spirling, Arthur G <a.spirling(a)imperial.ac.uk> To: Haigh, Joanna D <j.haigh(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Laptev, Ari <a.laptev(a)imperial.ac.uk> CC: Colling, David J <d.colling(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Moore, Dan R <dan.moore(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Cummins, Bob D <r.cummins(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Allatt, Paul <p.allatt(a)imperial.ac.uk> Dear All, Despite asking several times, Wolfram have not provided details of PCs allegedly holding unauthorised copies of Mathematica but have instead sent the e-mail below. I have responded as you can see and will be taking legal advice in the new year. In the meantime ICT is doing a proactive search to see if we can find where these copies might be. This is not easy, and for those MS and Linux PCs/Macs , particularly those owned by research groups, that never access the IC domain, impossible. It may be necessary to visit each machine and check them out by hand. In the new year it is essential that we determine how many licensed copies are needed in Physics and Mathematics and if the license renewal we have undertaken is not adequate adjust it. Regards Arthur *From:* Spirling, Arthur G *Sent:* 23 December 2009 15:37 *To:* 'Eric Schacht' *Cc:* Rector; Neil Thomas; Hancock, Jon B; Allatt, Paul *Subject:* RE: Imperial College and Wolfram Research - Mathematica Piracy Dear Mr Schacht, I am in receipt of your e-mail dated 22^nd December and have passed it to our legal advisors for comment. I am disappointed that I have had no formal response to the four e-mails (dated 15^th October, 28^th October, 5^th November, 13^th November 2009), that I have sent to your organisation requesting details of the computers alleged to be holding unauthorised copies of Wolfram software. Your failure to provide this information has hindered me in carrying out my College’s instructions which , based on a long standing College IT policy, are to delete all unauthorised copies of software. As soon as you provide the information I will take immediate steps to delete the copies. The College is now closed until 4^th January 2010 so I regret you will not hear further from us until after that date. Best wishes for a very happy Christmas. Regards Arthur Spirling * Arthur Spirling * Director of ICT * Information and Communication Technologies, * Room 441, Sherfield Building, * Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BX, * Int 46930 Dial 020 7594 6930 E-mail a.spirling(a)imperial.ac.uk <mailto:a.spirling@imperial.ac.uk> *From:* Eric Schacht [mailto:erics@wolfram.com] *Sent:* 22 December 2009 16:17 *To:* Spirling, Arthur G *Cc:* Rector; Neil Thomas *Subject:* Imperial College and Wolfram Research - Mathematica Piracy December 22, 2009 *SENT BY POST AND EMAIL* Arthur Spirling, Director of ICT (a.spirling(a)imperial.ac.uk <mailto:a.spirling@imperial.ac.uk>) Imperial College London This letter is in follow-up to the many discussions concerning the pervasive software piracy Wolfram Research has identified at Imperial College. It is sent in the spirit of our mutual desire to rectify the situation. We have previously identified a sampling of the pirated licenses, and your internal review revealed those, in fact, to be pirated licenses. Furthermore, it is significant that we were first alerted to this (possibly longstanding) piracy by a whistleblower, a senior employee internal to Imperial. Our demand of Imperial is that Imperial take immediate action to address the other 280+ illegal copies of /Mathematica/ we have identified to be in use at Imperial. We are not able to provide specific information on these users based on the strict UK and EU protocols and regulations concerning data protection and privacy. However if the Imperial investigation is not able to provide answers and to remedy the situation, we will have no choice but to turn over the information we have to the appropriate law enforcement agency(s). It would seem as though that course would be one of last resort for both of our organizations. We would like an update as to the progress of the internal Imperial investigation into the piracy issues we’ve made you aware of, and to have an affirmative statement from you that no staff members have been advertizing or in any way promoting this or similar software piracy. Additionally, we will require an authoritative statement as to the other software piracy investigations ongoing at Imperial. We are concerned that some of the hostility we have experienced from various factions of Imperial over the course of our relationship has spawned or nurtured this rampant activity with the Mathematica software. The clear alternative to either initiating a billing against Imperial for the illegal use, or to turning the matter over to the authorities, is to construct a licensing scheme between our organizations which would enable the obviously widespread /Mathematica/ use at Imperial to be properly licensed under the umbrella of an unlimited seat Site License. Wolfram Research stands ready to offer a pricing package on same terms as to other similar institutions and strongly urges Imperial to consider this action to mitigate against the illegal use that is prevalent at the College. Eric L. Schacht General Counsel Wolfram Research cc. Sir Roy Anderson (rector(a)imperial.ac.uk <mailto:rector@imperial.ac.uk>)

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Minutes of the Physics Departmental Computing Meeting: 2/11/2009
by Raymond Beuselinck 14 Nov '09

14 Nov '09

Present: -------- David Colling, Raymond Beuselinck (HEP), Robert Kingham (Plasma), Stefan Scheel (QOLS), James Spencer (CMTH), Carl Paterson (Photonics), Elizabeth Lucek (2nd Year Computing), John Conway (Learning Technology), Stephen Quirke, Adrian Wong, Adrian Mannall (ICT) General summary: ---------------- In the absence of a specific agenda representatives of each group present gave a brief summary of activity and computing requirements within their section with a view to identifying common areas of interest. The main issue to emerge concerned provision of software licences in a cost effective manner, in particular for Mathematica. There were three main action items to emerge from the meeting for consideration: 1. Mathematica licensing 2. Undergraduate computing project servers 3. Distribution list for the Daily ICT bulletin For details on the action items see the earlier message from David Colling. Adrian Mannall gave a report of news from ICT. This has already been forwarded to this mailing list. It was agreed to aim for future meetings roughly one per term. Reports from the groups: ------------------------ Plasma: The group are heavy users of HPC resources and have contributed 500 cores to the system in exchange for a dedicated queue. It is felt that the documentation of the HPC system is inadequate. There is also a small cluster of machines in the level 1 Huxley computer room. The group runs a web server for data hosting. There are 14 Matlab licences used in the plasma group. QOLS: There are four sub-groups within QOLS, each with their own systems. They are not using HPC yet. The CCM group are collecting huge amounts of data (Terabyte datasets) and are using a commercial backup service in Germany which costs 49 Euros per Tb per month; this is cheaper than ICT can provide. CMTH: The group has a half-time sysadmin. There are about 40 Linux workstations and a couple of very old clusters in the group. CMTH are heavy HPC users. They have licences for Maple, Mathematica (~5) and Intel compilers. They run their own web server and NFS server. They currently do their own tape backups. Photonics: The group is running a mixture of operating systems. They are not using HPC very much. There is an ageing cluster of 36 machines. There are a number of computers running equipment which results in old operating systems tied to old hardware. There is an NFS3 server and lots of ad hoc systems behind a local firewall. There are number of web servers and blog servers running. There are some Matlab users and some use of Mathematica. Due to the high costs of licensing for large clusters there is increasing use of Python for large computations. The group has an increasing need for data storage. HEP: The group has a mixture of Linux and Windows desktops. There is general purpose Linux cluster for group use, in addition to the Grid resources which form a large part of the London Tier 2 located in our computer room in level 1 Blackett. The group has a full time system manager and is in the process of hiring an additional system manager to support the Grid resources. The group runs its own web server and mail server. There are two backup servers for local accounts and essential systems. On the Grid side we have about 700Tbytes of storage locally, but none of it is unique data. The group's most notable requirement is for high network throughput to external sites for Grid traffic. The network link to the computer room has been upgraded to 10Gb. Teaching: There was some discussion of what we should be teaching the undergraduates. We currently teach C++ and this remains popular with the students as it is perceived to be a valuable addition to their CV. Whether we should be using a Windows environment for this is less obvious. Most research computation is done on Unix based systems. The possibility of running Linux in a virtual machine on the teaching PCs was suggested. Provision of dedicated servers for long running undergraduate projects was also discussed; see the earlier summary of actions circulated by David Colling. John Conway distributed copies of information on the various services available to the department in support of teaching activities. In particular the availability of scripting tools to automate tasks such as collating course marks and generating a variety of reports and statistics was discussed.

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Actions from last weeks departmental computing meeting
by David Colling 11 Nov '09

11 Nov '09

Dear All, I know that Ray has been extraordinarily busy since our meeting last week and so has not had time to write up the minutes so I have decided to send out a brief reminder of the actions so that we can make some progress. The first action has been augmented following an exchange of email with Arthur Spirling (ICT director) and so is not exactly as it was when we discussed it. 1. Mathematica ================ a. It is important that we stop all illegal use of this program within Physics. Wolfram believe that there are many illegal copies in use here (although will not tell us who they are). I know that Jo has emailed all staff saying that this must stop but we should publicise that it needs to stop to all members of our group. b. Legitimate use - we should asses how many licenses are needed in physics and purchase the best deal available. Apparently, physics already has three license servers and our options are to either increase the number of licenses that they serve or to by a license for the department and which is most cost effective depends on the numbers. So please could each of you survey your group as to how many people do already use mathematica and how many would like to use it so that we can take this forward. *** I would be grateful if you could do this by next Monday. 2. UG Project Servers ====================== There was a suggestion that the department should buy some dedicated hardware for MSci (and other?) UG projects as there were often machines in the UG computing suite with notes asking people not to use them as they were running projects. Please could you survey the people who supervise projects in your group asking if they really think that dedicated hardware would be useful and if so how much and running what OS. *** I would be grateful if you could do this by next Monday. 3. List of technical people who should receive the Daily ICT bulletin ======================================================================= I receive the daily ICT Bulletin and it as agreed at the meeting that while the people at the meeting where not all the correct people to receive the this level of information there usually is somebody more technical in each group who should receive it. I will ask ICT to set up an email list for these people and automatically forward a copy to this list as it comes into my inbox. Please could you send me the email addresses of people who should be on this technical forum. *** this is going to be ongoing. There were was also an action on me to forward Adrian's email (which I have only just done). My apologies for asking to carry out points one and two at reasonably short notice, but I am hopeing that this just involves sending an email out to your group and collating the answers and so is not too much work. All the best, david

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Important - [Fwd: DUC Meeting Wednesday 11 November 2009]
by David Colling 10 Nov '09

10 Nov '09

Dear All, I received this last night for a meeting that is at 2pm tomorrow. I would appreciate any suggestions for item 7 on the draft agenda ideally before 2pm tomorrow - apologies for the short notice. All the best, david -------- Original Message -------- Subject: DUC Meeting Wednesday 11 November 2009 Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 17:03:23 +0000 From: Van Zyl, Tracey L <tracey.vanzyl(a)imperial.ac.uk> To: Departmental Users Committee <ict-ducmembers-dl(a)imperial.ac.uk> Dear all Please find the relevant papers for Wednesdays meeting on the sharepoint page at _https://sharepoint.ic.ac.uk/ICT/DUC/default.aspx_ The papers include a DRAFT Agenda which requires thought from members beforehand for item 7. I am also attaching a copy to this email. The outlook invite will now be updated with the venue (58PG, Billiard Room). Kind regards Tracey van Zyl Executive Assistant to Arthur Spirling Director: ICT, Imperial College London e-mail: tracey.vanzyl(a)imperial.ac.uk Tel +44 (0)20 7594 6911 Fax +44 (0)20 7594 6914

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News from ICT ... [Fwd: RE: Reminder of today's meeting]
by David Colling 10 Nov '09

10 Nov '09

After last week's meeting I was supposed to forward this email to the list. My apologies for the delay. All the best, david -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: [Physics-Departmental-Computing] Reminder of today's meeting Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 11:04:17 +0000 From: Mannall, Adrian B <a.mannall(a)imperial.ac.uk> To: Colling, David J <d.colling(a)imperial.ac.uk> CC: Wong, Adrian S L <adrian.wong(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Quirke, Stephen M <s.quirke(a)imperial.ac.uk>, Rochford, Steve <s.rochford(a)imperial.ac.uk> References: <4AEEB1F1.60902(a)imperial.ac.uk> Hi David, As promised - some ICT News: Staffing: Steve Rochford is the Team Leader for FoNS SK West - unfortunately he's on leave this week so won't be at the meeting. Mo Ali has moved from FoNS SK West team (supporting Huxley and Blackett Buildings) to FoNS SK South. Dan Ott-Mia has been seconded to ICT's Admin and Business School Support group for 6 months to help them with the workload there. Steve Quirke has moved office from Huxley to Blackett to help with day to day support of Physics users - Steve has strong Mac, Linux and Windows skills so should be able to help with most queries - and if he doesn't have the answer immediately to hand he knows where to go for assistance. Networks: Much work is going on within Blackett to reduce the number of Central Wiring Closets and re-cable floors back to these CWCs. Ultimately this will improve the network connectivity for all as the new CWCs are being fitted with the Extreme X450 switches which are capable of providing faster network links to the desktop. The College backbone now runs at 10Gb. HEP have been provided the facility to run a 10Gb link to the Internet to facilitate fast data downloads from CERN and the LHC project. Infrastructure: All College based mailboxes on ICT infrastructure are now serviced from Exchange 2007 servers. This provides greater integration with our telephony as we move forwards over the next few years to VOIP based communications. It also means we won't have to purchase any upgrades to the Voicemail system as voicemail will move to Exchange as part of the unification of communications. Unified Communications - ICT now run Office Communications Server and Live Meeting systems such that there is a "corporate" messaging, voice and video application available across College. This is being rolled out initially to groups who express an interest / have requirements for this. If anyone would like a demonstration / training or to enable their group then please contact Adrian Mannall or Steve Rochford and we can assist with moving this forwards. Email Archiving - ICT has purchased an archiving solution that will enable auto archiving to ICT based infrastructure - thus eventually removing the spectre of lost PSTs, etc. This is currently being bedded in and tested within ICT. An early adopters programme will follow shortly and the system will be rolled out widely after Christmas. NFS services - ICT have NFS servers to provide Linux / Unix accessible home areas on centralised infrastructure. If you have a group who would like to consider moving to this (perhaps your current servers are reaching the end of their serviceable life) then please contact u to discuss this. Mac Support - ICT have been working hard to provide more coherent Mac support. We have again provided opportunities for Apple Maintenance Program purchase (3 years of OS upgrades) and will continue to work towards covering as many people as we can with this. The cost is borne by individuals / research groups - we are not yet at the point of being able to "site license" Macs - partly due to the way that Apple run their licensing schemes and the fact that it takes Apple ages to move things forwards in Europe as it has to go through US based legal departments! We currently continue to purchase many desktop systems through HP. Work has been going on to resolve some pricing issues with the new Z series workstations and this should be reflected in the pricing in the next week or so on the catalogue. If people are considering the purchase of new computer systems then please do ask us for a quote or for help - the HP pricing is very favourable particularly for desktop and laptop systems - upwards of £250 cheaper than DELL or High Street HP prices! Data Centre - ICT continues to offer free hosting of servers in the Data Centre in Mechanical Engineering - should you wish to explore this please contact Adrian Mannall. HPC - The College has committed to funding improvements in HPC over the next three years with approximately £3million being spent expanding and updating the current systems. A new SGI box has recently arrived and will be going into service shortly. If you wish to discuss HPC then please talk to Adrian Mannall and he can put you in touch with the HPC manager in ICT. To conclude - if you are considering any new projects or expansion of existing projects then please do talk to us. We don't guarantee to be able to help with every request but we are here as a service to be used and we will do our best wherever possible to assist you - the department's paid for ICT so try us out and see what we can offer. Regards, Adrian -----Original Message----- From: physics-departmental-computing-bounces(a)imperial.ac.uk [mailto:physics-departmental-computing-bounces@imperial.ac.uk] On Behalf Of David Colling Sent: 02 November 2009 10:18 To: physics-departmental-computing; Wong, Adrian S L; Quirke, Stephen M Subject: [Physics-Departmental-Computing] Reminder of today's meeting Dear All, It turned out that I had even less email access than I thought when I was on holiday and even if I drove to the nearest town which had a sniff of GPRS signal (3G was not an option) it was not sufficient to sync my mail so my apologies for the late notice. I have room 539 in Blackett booked from midday, and as I said earlier think tat we should start at 12.10 sharp giving people time to get out of labs and lectures etc. If anybody has sent me agenda items I will draw up a formal agenda (I haven't checked my email yet) however the main point is to asses were we are what we want to use these meeting for. There will also be news status from ICT. All the best, david _______________________________________________ Physics-Departmental-Computing mailing list Physics-Departmental-Computing(a)imperial.ac.uk https://mailman.ic.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/physics-departmental-computing

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Reminder of today's meeting
by David Colling 02 Nov '09

02 Nov '09

Dear All, It turned out that I had even less email access than I thought when I was on holiday and even if I drove to the nearest town which had a sniff of GPRS signal (3G was not an option) it was not sufficient to sync my mail so my apologies for the late notice. I have room 539 in Blackett booked from midday, and as I said earlier think tat we should start at 12.10 sharp giving people time to get out of labs and lectures etc. If anybody has sent me agenda items I will draw up a formal agenda (I haven't checked my email yet) however the main point is to asses were we are what we want to use these meeting for. There will also be news status from ICT. All the best, david

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Departmental Computing Meeting
by David Colling 27 Oct '09

27 Oct '09

Dear All, As I said in my email before the summer holiday, I think that we should have departmental computing meetings roughly once a term. I suggest that we give term a few weeks to settle down but meet before the DUC meeting which is in my diary as the 11 of November. So I have created a doodle page so that people can give me their availability. This can be found at http://www.doodle.com/sf3kwfcnwxxn7gd3. The meetings used to be at lunch time and I was planning to continue this unless there is a strong objection. The people currently on the email list are: Adrian Mannall ICT Carl Paterson Photonics David Clements 1st year computing David Colling HEP (Chair) Elizabeth Lucek 2nd year computing James Spencer Condensed Matter Teory Jing Zhang EXSS Section Kostas Georgiou HEP Mo Ali UG lab Martin Morris UG lab Peter Torok Photonics Ray Beuselinck HEP Robert Kingham Plasma Physics Steve Rochford ICT Stefan Scheel Quantum Optics and laser science Simon Bland Plasma Tim Evans Theory If any of names or affiliations are wrong then I apologies and please send me a correction as this list will end up on some departmental website at some point. As far as I can see at a quick reading all the research groups have at least one representative apart from Astro and SPAT. It so happens that the 1st and 2nd year computing head are from those groups so they may be the correct people to represent those groups, however, I have copied the heads of both of those groups onto this email to give them a chance to nominate somebody. One last thing, when last mailed it was just before a meeting with ICT. One of the big problems that people flagged up was communication from ICT as to what is going on and when. As a result of this I now receive the Daily Bulletin of what is going on. Would people like me to automatically forward this to this list or would they view it as spam? I will go with a majority of those who express an opinion. All the best, david

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[Fwd: FW: Important! Maintenance work affecting access to your home directory (H drive)- 24th October]
by David Colling 16 Oct '09

16 Oct '09

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ICT Issues
by Rochford, Steve 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

First, a brief introduction; I know I've met some of the people here but for those who've not met me I'm the IT Services site manager and it's my job to try and make sure that IT provides a useful service in Blackett and Huxley. I'm based in Huxley 616 if you ever want to visit me. ICT provides a centrally hosted Wiki service. Details are on the College web site - http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict/services/databasewebsiteandmediaservices/web… I'm not sure what more info we can give about eduroam; it's aimed at academic visitors to Imperial and was set up quite some time ago. It's one of the SSIDs you will see if you try to use a wireless network here. You can get to (brief!) information about it by starting at the ICT home page (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/ict) then clicking "Wireless Access" and "What is on offer at Imperial" If you want to use eduroam when you go to another institution then you have to register first (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict/services/securitynetworkdatacentreandtelepho…) In maths, the departmental rep asked for a "bulk" registration of staff and we can do the same for physics staff if that is useful. I know that there were many issues when we moved to Exchange 2007, particularly for non-Windows clients but I understood that most (if not all of these) had been fixed. If there are still problems with reliable connections to the servers then do please let me know and I can try and get the problems fixed. I don't know if this is related, but there were some hardware problems with mail servers which didn't help the reliability earlier this year. As far as I know, these are now fixed. One of the useful ICT service desk pages is http://www.imperial.ac.uk/ict/servicedesk/status/ and this will show "live" updates of any serious issues affecting ICT services. The problem of people emailing huge attachments is not new and it is ultimately a training issue rather than a technological problem. ICT does provide secure group space which could be used to store these attachments and a link sent with the email. I can certainly raise the issue of how we should train staff to make better use of central storage. Another means of communication which some people find useful is Sharepoint (https://sharepoint.ic.ac.uk/; log in if prompted with IC\<username> and your standard college password) Any member of staff can create their own site and choose to share it with any group of users and we can also set up shared document libraries etc in there for particular groups of users. Steve

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Meeting with ICT
by David Colling 15 Jul '09

15 Jul '09

Dear All, I have been invited to a meeting between ICT and the Head of Department. The agenda is pretty broad and is: > > Topic - Review of ICT service provision to Dept > > Good things about ICT Services > > Problems or issues with ICT Services > > Requirements (future or existing) which need to be me and which are not > being met. > > I think that the people on this list are correct people to have input into this meeting. So I would be very interested in any services that you feel are provided well, or, those tat are not provided well enough (if at all). Clearly thi applies to both teaching and research. Talking to a couple of people informally the things that came up were: - a desire to have centralised wikis - communications - especially concerning items like the status of the plan for the rewiring. I hope that we can improve this via this list. - the extent of the wireless coverage. Clearly, it would be very useful to have a list going into this meeting. It would be very easy for people to only send issues or future wishes, but please do send mails outlining what you think ICT do well. I would also encourage people to send to this list rather than directly to me so that others can react if they strongly agree/disagree. All the best, david

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