This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Enhancements to the Resource s computational facility (www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Computers/), have focused in four major areas in the last year: the creation of a formal Visitor Center to support external users of the Resource, upgrading our developer workstations, basic server infrastructure upgrades, and the implementation of a new, easier-to-use web design. The most important change in the last year has come with the creation of an official Visitor Center. At present, 45 of the 94 users on our systems are visitors; but they have historically used the same office and computational facilities as our regular users, which in many cases has not been appropriate. Now, using new space provided by the Beckman Institute, we can offer visitors an impressive facility to perform short- and long-term collaborations with the Resource. As most visitors prefer to use their own equipment for most work, the facility offers docking stations with 21 LCD monitors, to allow for up to four simultaneous visitors to best utilize their personal laptops. Two graphics workstations installed in the Center offer easy access to our array of computational and visualization resources. For the second year running, the most obvious change in our environment has been an upgrade to the Resource s desktop workstations, specifically those of the professional software developers, now each equipped with a Sun Ultra 20 workstation. While these desktops are not capable of powerful 3D graphics, they are remarkably quiet, stable, and powerful machines, perfect for the needs of our programmers and administrators. Thirteen (13) of these systems have been deployed, replacing the 5-year-old Athlon 1333 workstations. These upgrades will ensure that our developers will not be limited by their desktop workstations until the end of our grant period. Our third major change in the last year has come behind the scenes, as we continued to modernize our existing server infrastructure. We have retired all of our nonrackmount server hardware, increasing our system reliability and freeing valuable space in our server room. To replace our old servers, we have purchased just two additional SunFire V240 servers and an additional 3.5 TB of disk, bringing our total disk capacity to 20 TB. The final major change in our computational environment has been an upgrade to the look and feel of our main web site. After nearly two years of work, we went live with the new design on 08 Mar 2006. The new design incorporates the most important web technology improvement of the last five years cascading stylesheets to offer a web site that is easier to navigate, filled with more useful content, is more responsive, and is even easier to maintain. We look at the web site as our crown jewel, and the new design has given it a much-needed polishing. Our computational growth has once again come from the national Supercomputing centers. The total number of raw Service Units awarded to us by the Large Resource Allocations Committee (www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Computers/nrac.html) increased from last year by about 500,000 SUs to a total of 3.6 million. Adjusted for processor speed, this translates to a 30% increase in compute power since last year. This time is supplemented by our local compute clusters, which remain unchanged from last year.
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