HPC Services staff member Yong Qin was part of a panel, along with other Berkeley Lab scientists from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, at the Silicon Valley Data Center Efficiency Summit 2012 last week in San Jose talking about Berkeley Lab's recently released study to understand the feasibility of implementing Demand Response and control strategies in Data Centers. Yong discussed the issues and our experiences related to reducing or geographically shifting computational workload to a remote data center as a response to a demand to lower electrical usage.
In another session, IT Division Infrastructure group lead Ed Ritenour presented our work with SynapeSense to convert our CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) cooling units to use sensor driven VFD (Variable Frequency Drives) to automatically adjust the cooling in the Data Center to meet cooling demands and save power. 
The Plan
We will be upgrading Commons to Confluence 4.2 on Sunday, 11/4, starting at 10am. The system will most likely be up within 3 hours, but a number of manual adjustments will be required post-upgrade, causing some pages to have display issues beyond that time.
Commons hosts a number of external facing websites, including BISICLES, Chombo, CIO, Facilities, Human Resources, IT Division, Neaton Group, Nuclear Science Division Safety Culture and sustainLBL.
Impact
Wiki markup - the way pages were written and stored in the past goes away. Content will now be stored natively in HTML5 and a richer editing experience will become available. This represents the single biggest upgrade we have undertaken since Commons was first deployed at the lab.
With 4.2 comes a significant upgrade in page editing capabilities. For more information, go here.
Gdrive - the new UI will soon become the default
Google is going to start rolling out changes related to the Google Drive User interface - here is the current schedule.
From 8th November
Google will begin showing a banner to all users who have opted out and are using the old look for Docs.
The banner will read “The old look of Google Docs will be going away soon - Upgrade” and will include a link to allow users to switch to the Drive web interface.
From 15th November,
Users who have opted out will be automatically switched over to the new Drive web interface.
Users can still switch back to the old Docs look (by clicking the gears icon and selecting 'Temporarily use the old look"). If users revert to the old look, they will again see the banner advising them that the old look is going away.
From 29th November
All users who have reverted to the old Docs look will be switched to the Drive web interface again for the last time.
At this time, the ability to switch back to the old Docs look will be disabled and the new Drive web interface will be mandatory for all users.
IT is sponsoring another 2 hour Matlab seminar in the bldg 50 Auditorium on Thursday, October 11
Presenter: Saket Kharsikar, MathWorks Application Engineer
Agenda
1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
Advanced Graphics and Visualization Techniques with MATLAB
This session will focus on visualizing data, viewing images, and manipulating graphics in MATLAB. We will explore techniques for customizing graphical displays, generating animations, and creating publication quality graphics. We will present approaches to working with and displaying large data sets and images, and will discuss data importing, block-processing and re-sampling. Finally, we will investigate the visualization of higher-dimension data, with a focus on volumetric slicing and vector fields.
Highlights Include:
- Introduction to Handle Graphics
- Creating Animation
- Customizing Graphics
- Analysis of Large Data and Imagery
- Techniques for Higher- Dimension Visualization Parallel Computing with MATLAB
Register at http://www.mathworks.com/seminars/LBNL12 (although this is not mandatory, it will help us plan for the event).
