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EMS Environment Institute

The Environmental Computing Facility

The Environmental Computing Facility (ECF) provides a unique set of computing resources to the Environment Institute and its affiliates. The physical resources are made up of over 100 workstations, a Cray SV1 parallel vector system and an IBM SP parallel computer. This hardware supports the research needs of well over 500 users.

Desktop workstations are connected to the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences network via 100Mb/s Ethernet. Gigabit Ethernet links interconnect key servers with switches in the College network. The HPC machines and several servers are interconnected with a HiPPI network. The College network interconnects with the University backbone via several 100Mb/s links and The university backbone has Internet connectivity via OC-12 POS links to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and NCNE.net for both commodity and Internet2 traffic.

The ECF also maintains a tape storage silo to provide mass data storage. This data storage system, located in 312 Earth & Engineering Sciences Building, was originally acquired to store the large climate model data sets used by the Institute's researchers. Access to the mass storage system has now been extended to all members of the EMS community on a cost-per-MB basis. The system is comprised of a StorageTek tape silo with 6,000 tape slots, a robotic mechanism for automatically handling the tapes, and several tape drives of various capabilities; a server computer connected to the silo that runs Tivoli Storage Manager server software that enables us to manipulate and keep track of the client data stored in the silo; and client software installed on other computers that communicate with the storage server computer to store or retrieve data files. In all, it can provide nearly 2 petabytes (i.e., 2 million gigabytes or 2 billion megabytes) of tape storage which is accessible day or night without operator intervention.

This is an alternate format of the standard ECF website that provides a simpler presentation.

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