Information Technology
Resources at the Geosciences Department,
Latest version of this
document - http://support.geosc.uh.edu/docs/fac.htm
Note: Make http://support.geosc.uh.edu as your
first point of help for any IT related problems. This site is kept updated and
you will find answers to most of your common problems at this site. Also help
on using most of the resources listed here is available in the form of
Documentation / FAQ at the above support site.
Systems Admin is, Jay
Krishnan, 713.743.1697 (jkrishnan@uh.edu),
Web Admin/General IT support
is Santos Gaitan, 713.743.3082 (sgaitan@uh.edu)
Introduction
IT
resources at the Geosciences department comprise of the software and hardware
(printers, plotters, scanners, tape drives) in the computer labs for general
student/staff use, High Performance Compute (HPC) and application servers
(Beowulf clusters, SUN/PC servers, and Application software, web/ftp server),
data storage repositories, visualization systems and the IT staff. This
document aims to provide new users with a broad view of these resources use
this document as a starting point to familiarize yourself so you can make the
best possible use of these resources. This
document does not describe the hows of using software or a particular resource,
please access http://support.geosc.uh.edu
for that.
Computer
Labs
PC/SUN
computer and multimedia Lab in Room 230 & 232, SR-1
Note:
These Labs are kept under constant camera surveillance
This
is the main computer lab for students and faculty located at Room 232, Science
and Research 1 Building. Full time graduate students and staff are provided
keys (23-B4) to access this lab, but part time students, undergraduate
students, temporary staff etc can access this lab with a key-code. This
key-code is changed every semester and the sys admin will email it to all
current users. Use this code on the touch pad outside the door to gain entry to
the lab. This lab consists of a medley of PC and SUN workstations. The PCs run
Windows XP and the SUNS run Solaris Operating System. Most of the SUN
workstations are dual headed (have two monitors), one of these monitors is switched with the PC, so you may have to
access a switch (usually next to one of the monitors and switch to get the
correct display SUN or WINDOWS). You can login and use both the SUNS and
Windows at the same time but with separate keyboards. Classes involving the use of any Pc/SUN software meet in this room
(230)
Some Lab rules/etiquettes
1. Do not lock any of the monitors (ON SUN or
PC systems), this leads to systems being unavailable during class hours also others
may reboot these systems leading to your data loss/corruption continuous
offenders will have their accounts suspended.
2. Please keep the lab area clean, do not bring
food or water into the lab.
3. Keep noise level to a minimum.
4. If you see any problems with
hardware/software please send an email to jkrishnan@uh.edu,
please do not send questions about software/hardware usage etc - access http://support.geosc.uh.edu for that.
About
this Lab
PC workstations Software & Hardware
The PCs are equipped with a variety of
software, below is a list (not meant to be comprehensive), please login to any
PC and to view an updated list.
1. Acrobat-7 (reader and writer)
2. ArcGIS-9_1 (GIS software)
3. ArcInfo Work Station 9 (GIS Software)
4. Basinmod (Geological Modeling Software)
5. Canvas-10 (Illustration Software)
6. Coreldraw-11 (Illustration Software)
7. DeltaGraph (Graphing)
8. Endnote-5 (Bibliography software)
9. Envi-4.1 (Remote Sensing)
10. Illustrator-CS2 (Illustration Software)
11. Kaleidagraph-3_5 (Graphing)
1. Nero (CD Writing Software)
2. Neuralog (Well Log Data analysis software)
3. Office-2003 (Productivity software)
4. Photoshop-CS2 (Image Editing)
5. SMT_7.6 (Seismic & Geological
Interpretation software).
6. Thinanywhere (Remote access software)
7. Secure Shell (Secure access software to the
UNIX workstations)
8. Quicktime & Windows Media Players
9. Mcafee Anti Virus software
The PCs are kept up-to-date with the
applicable software patches etc on a regular basis. All the systems are Pentium
IV class systems with a minimum of 512 MB of memory and a high end video card.
All of them have a CD-WRITER and most have DVD-WRITERS and Zip Drives. Most PCs
have USB and firewire slots in the front/back.
SUN Workstations Software
& hardware
The
following software is available on the SUNS. (Not meant to be comprehensive)
1. Acrobat4
2. EarthWave-1.2_Solaris (Seismic Modeling and
Imaging Software)
3. GDCMOD
4. GMT (GMT is an open source collection of ~60
tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets)
5. Matlab5.3
6. SU (Seismic UNIX, From Colorado
7. Seplib6.1.1 (SepLib Library, From Stanford)
8. Solid
9. Geoframe 4.0.4
10. Focus 5.1 and 5.2
11. VoxelGeo
12. Geodepth
13. StartiMagic
14. GmSYS
15. Larson (Plotin Software)
16. GCC and SUNS C and FORTRAN Compilers
17. Hampson and Russell Software
The
SUNS are SUN Blade 100s. All of them expect 2 have dual graphic cards and they
are 3D capable cards.
PC/SUN Lab in room 230
Multimedia Lab in Room 230
printing (color and b/w) plotting and scanning tools
Note: Detailed plotting /
printing / scanning help is available at http://support.geosc.uh.edu
Rooms
230 and 232 are connected so gaining access to 232 will provide you access to the
multimedia room in 230. This room consists of several PCs, some sun
workstations and variety of plotting/scanning/printing tools. For your Black
and White printing needs there is a Xerox N2125 printer, for your plotting and
color printing needs we have a HP 1055CM 36 inch wide plotter and HP Color
Printer (both the plotter and printer are connected locally to a single
workstation and thus can only be accessed from this workstation). All B/W printouts are monitored and each
student is give a 25 $ credit for the semester, it is 4 cents to print a page.
If you run out of credit, you will have to wait till next semester (no
exceptions unless you are submitting a thesis copy and need large volume
printing).
Additionally,
this room also contains several scanners and one system at the far end (look
around) for doing OCR (Optical Scanning Recognition, image to text conversion).
Simple instructions on using these scanners are posted on the scanners
themselves. You can also use the Department Copier (on the third floor) to scan
images which will not get deducted from your copier account (instructions are
posted above the copier)
This
room also contains several Tape drives for doing data dumps and backups of
large volume of data. DLT, Exabyte and DDS tape drives.
Multimedia Room, Room 232
Additionally
there are several other Geosciences Computer Labs which are not directly
managed by Geosciences IT but are available for use by the staff/students with
appropriate permission. Some of the these labs are
- Remote
Sensing Lab - http://geoinfo.geosc.uh.edu/GeoRS/
High
Performance Compute (HPC) servers
The
Geosciences department has at its disposal a large amount of compute power in
ways of
- Four Beowulf Clusters
- A combined total of close to 300 nodes
and 300 GB of memory, Xeon 1.8 3 GHZ processors.
(Specs of each node)
Supermicro Motherboards
Xeon 1.8 2.8 GHz processors
Opteron 248 Processors
2 GB ECC memory
Broadcom or Intel Gigabit Controller
3com/Trendnet/SMC Gigabit Switches
- About 40 TeraBytes of high speed SCSI
storage systems.
- Several
mid-range V880 sun servers
·
8-12
processors, ultrasparc III, 750 1200 MHZ, more than 16 GB of memory
- Access to
the campus HPCC (http://hpcc.uh.edu)
- Access to
TLC2 computing facilities (http://tlc2.uh.edu)
On
all Beowulf clusters, access the /usr/public directory on the master node to
get detailed information about the hardware, software, and benchmarks for that
cluster.
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Server Room
Additionally,
we have several other IT resources like Analog to Digital Conversion systems,
Classrooms equipped with Projectors, support from VNET (http://vnet.uh.edu), etc.