Minutes of the Departmental Computing Meeting 20/4/2010 ------------------------------------------------------- Present ------- Elizabeth Lucek - Teaching Carl Paterson - photonics James Spencer - CMTH Adrian Mannall, Steve Rochford - ICT Richard Bantges - SPAT Stefan Scheel - QOLS Carlo Contaldi - Theory Harry Vine - Admin Simon Fayer, Raymond Beuselinck, David Colling - HEP 1. News from ICT ---------------- SAN controller software is being updated (affecting e.g. home directories, Exchange folders). Mail archiving on Exchange is now available (using cheaper SATA based storage). This works easily in Outlook or the web interface. It doesn't work too well in browsers other than Internet Explorer. Archiving will automatically stub anything older than about 3 months. Access is not so easy for Linux or mac users. Searching within archived messages is possible. General rollout of the archiving system is on hold due to problems for some types of user (e.g. Linux or Mac mail clients). Details are available on the ICT web site. 2. Services to be cut --------------------- ICT are seeking feedback on what services could be most easily be cut to save money. Before the meeting DJC circulated a web form for comments which would enable people to rate each item in the ICT SLA according to how important it was considered to be. It was suggested that the form should be modified to exclude items that clearly cannot be cut, e.g. Authentication and Directory Services and Network Infrastructure and that it would be more useful to emphasise what services we think are important, rather than the reverse. It is difficult to assess the impact of specific cuts without information on the costs of services as well as the amount of take up, but this is not easy to obtain. DJC will update the form before circulating it more widely. In response to a question about support for Linux Steve Rochford commented that a lot of the Linux support related to business systems, e.g. ICIS. 3. Volunteer to go to ICTAP meetings ------------------------------------ Following the departure of Kostas Georgiou the department needs to find a new volunteer to attend ICTAP meetings. These meetings consist of ICT discussions with departmental representatives and similarly interested parties. ICT reports on plans, changes to services etc. and listens to feedback or requests from the departments. These meetings are generally more technical than the DUC meetings and typically occur three or four times per year. Whoever attends the ICTAP meetings will also receive the daily email bulletin from ICT which covers any changes to or problems with services. No volunteers were forthcoming. DJC will try to persuade someone. 4. Licensing ------------ Mathematica licensing is being chased up. Wolfram and Imperial solicitors are now essentially shouting at each other. Wolfram alleges we have around 300 illegal users. Nowhere near that many users (in total) have been found yet by ICT. We will look at getting a departmental license server for Mathematica and buying a number of floating licences. (action DJC, AM). Other candidates for departmental licensing: -------------------------------------------- National Instruments suite: Labview IDL - Astro has a special deal which may be coming to an end. (A single IDL licence typically costs ~ £500.) SPAT has 250 IDL licences (legacy) ~ £5.5K per year rolling license cost and could potentially issue licences within the department. These could be node locked or floating licences. It is possible to access the SPAT license server via the College VPN service from outside. HEP uses a lot of finite element modelling (Autodesk). Most of the other departmental users use SolidWorks. There could be some use for per seat licences for occasional users. While there are a few users who use this more or less all the time there are potentially quite a few occasional users in the department. Faculty will pay for next years Intel compiler licences (£2800). Nobody should need to be paying for this. Contention for floating licences has not been a problem so far. NAGlib is freely available to the department (funded centrally). 5. News from groups ------------------- Teaching - no news. There were some comments that dual boot or virtual machine for Linux for undergraduate projects on the teaching lab computers would be useful. SPAT - Trying to get network upgraded to Gbit for moving large amounts of data. (next couple of months timescale.) They have been refused permission to run Matlab jobs on HPC. This is probably a licensing issue. Theory - down a sysadmin. HEP - Just got a 10Gbit link for LHC/Grid traffic. 6. Action list -------------- i) Find a new member for ICTAP meetings (DJC) ii) Investigate the possibility of a departmental license server for Mathematica (DJC and AM) Next meeting: Aim for a meeting towards the end of next term.