College of Engineering EECS Instructional Support Group June 26, 2006 EECS Instructional Computing - Review and Plans ----------------------------------------------- Spring 2006 CONTENTS: Mission Statement Budget Priorities Email and WEB Services Recent Improvements Current Initiatives Notable Events Mission Statement ----------------- The EECS Instructional Support Group (ISG) installs and maintains networked computers that are used by EECS classes. ISG provides computer accounts for instructors and students in the Instructional labs and on Instructional servers. ISG purchases, installs and maintains application software needed for classes. ISG supports instructional labs in Cory Hall, Soda Hall and Hearst Field Annex. These are the functions in which ISG interacts with other UCB support groups: - we obtain enrollment lists from the Registrar (Student Information Services) - we synchronize our user accounts with the EECS department (IDSG) - we provide cardkey pre-authorization for our students to EECS Facilities - we bill students' voluntary printer charges to CARS - we coordinate our use of the EECS Network Node Bank with IDSG and CNS - we manage the computers in engineering labs with ESG - we manage the computers in EECS conference rooms with ESG - we manage the licenses for Synopsys/TCAD/HSPICE with the Device Group - we manage the licenses for Cadence with the BSAC group Budget Priorities ----------------- In FY 2006-2007, our budget and grant priorities will be: - re-hire third student staff, to support CS Lower Division software and the UCWise courseware computing server ($12000) - upgrade 30 PCs in 105 Cory for EE20N and EE120 ($45000) - replace 60 kbds and monitors in 271 & 273 Soda ($18000) - 3 Sun V480s to replace cory.eecs and 2 SunRay servers in Soda ($21000) - 1 new multi-processor CPU server for CAD applications ($45000) Email and WEB Services ---------------------- 1) student accounts and email: ISG creates computer accounts for students in EECS classes. All EECS majors get computer accounts, email accounts and a WEB site on the Instructional computers until 6 months after they graduate. All students have CalMail accounts and no longer need an email account from us, so we plan to retire the Instructional email service by Aug 2006. 2) course WEB sites: Instructors can manage their course WEB content on the EECS Instuctional server. Other servers on campus offer other services including the course schedule and description, student enrollment and email lists, the submission of grades and a course management system. Instructors are encouraged to use new courseware services at http://bspace.berkeley.edu. This site is especially good for communicating with the students and for storing password-protected content. Recent Improvements ------------------- These are the major improvements in ISG resources from May 2005-May 2006: 1) Purchased new Sun Fire V440 Server (A42-XHB4C2-16HD, 4 * 1.593GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors with 1MB Cache each, 16GB Memory). It is valued at $31K and was purchased with a 50% SUN Matching Grant. It will serve the SunRays in 271 Soda and be a general computing login server. The existing server in 271 Soda will be reallocated to 273 Soda, so that performance in 273 Soda will be improved by having 2 SunRay servers. The primary benificiaries will be classes using Java and the Eclipse IDE (CS61B, CS188). 2) 119 Cory: renovated ("High Performance Computing Lab"). 16 DELL 670 (WinXP) with 3-GHz Xeon and 2-GB RAM, via grant from INTEL. Used by EE upper division classes for CAD tools and programming. New lab tables and chairs (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kevinm/119Cory/). 3) 330 Soda: upgraded ("Upper Division Computing Lab"). 30 Sun W1100s (WinXP) with 2.4-GHz Opteron and 1-GB RAM, via partial grant from SUN, used by CS programming classes (Visual Studio). New chairs. (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kevinm/330Soda/) 4) 275 Soda: upgraded ("Eclipse Lab"). 10 Sun Ultra 20s (Solaris X86) with 2.8-GHz Opteron and 2-GB RAM, donated by SUN, used by CS61B, CS188 and other CS programming classes (Java/Eclipse). CS61B and CS188 use Eclipse (an IDE for Java). These classes were previously assigned to a lab with SunRays, which share a single large Sun SPARC server. During Fall 2005 we found that Eclipse overwhelmed the server during labs, and the solution was for the students to run Eclipse on individual PCs instead of the shared server. These classes needed a larger lab with PCs, so in January 2006 we replaced the SunRays in 275 Soda with PCs from 277 Soda and added the 10 new Ultra 20s that Sun donated in November 2005. 5) 277 Soda: re-organized ("Collabarative Lab for Laptops"). CS4 needed a lab that is suitable for group interaction and coding using the HP laptops that Prof Garcia obtained on a grant for developing group collabaration. We provided empty table space with power outlets for this in 277 Soda, with storage space for the laptops nearby. If funding is available, we could replace the tables with more ergonometric furniture (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kevinm/277Soda/). 6) New "Fileservice": SunFire V20z with 1.7 TB disk space, purchased with Matching Grant from SUN. Provides home directories for courses and students, application software repository and file system mirroring. 7) Class WEB sites organized to manage archiving of old sites (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/setup.html#class_page) 8) Instructional computers are now compliant with campus firewall and security policy (http://security.berkeley.edu:2002/MinStds/). 9) Hired new PAII staff member (Linda Huang) to be sys admin for computers and servers in ESG labs and EECS conference rooms. 10) Ferenc Kovac gets credit for managing the upgrade of 67 PCs in 125 Cory (an ESG lab) in January 2006; we had no primary sys admin for the lab (Khossrov had left, Linda had not been hired yet), and Ferenc arranged to outsource the software installation to Berkeley Communications, with a good team effort from ESG/ISG staff and student volunteers. Current Initiatives ------------------- 1) Revision control server for classes A number of classes use the CVS revision control utility for source code development. CVS is somewhat difficult to master, it is UNIX- centric and uses ssh2 as an authenticion mechanism. So we intend to improve this by maintaining a central revision control server that can be accessed more easily from Windows as well as from UNIX. We are likely to use a more up-to-date utility called "subversion" rather than CVS. We have not implemented the Microsoft Visual Source Safe because it is does not work well on our multi-user workstations and it does not work with UNIX. 2) Improve Instructional WEB-based services for instructors. Currently, the development of EECS course WEB sites is inconsistent. Some classes have WEB sites that are well-maintained by the teaching staff, while other sites are left with old or inconsistent data. ISG provides a WEB server (inst.eecs), disk storage and technical assistance about the WEB sites. The teaching staff maintain the content. ISG will provide newer tools to help the teaching staff obtain, edit and archive the content of their sites. This will integrate information from other campus WEB resources to facilitate course administration. This may include WEB site publishing, access to students by email and newsgroups and access to the new campus GradeBook service. Instructors are also encouraged to use the new courseware services at http://bspace.berkeley.edu. 3) Purchase and Grant priorities: - new SunRay server for 271 Soda (CS61C, etc) - new parallel computing cluster (CS267, etc) - blade cluster (Intel) for Linux/Cadence (EE141, etc) Notable Events -------------- See http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/notices.html for current events. For additional information, please contact me: Kevin Mullally, ISG Manager EECS Instructional Support Group 378 Cory Hall, (510) 643-6141 kevinm@eecs.berkeley.edu http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/ source: ~inst/public_html/reports/managers/Spring_2006