High Performance Computing Services systems analyst Jackie Scoggins will be giving a talk about how we recently migrated our scheduling environment, which manages the job scheduling for all of our clusters, cluster condo users, and institutional computing at the Lab and for the UC Berkeley Research Computing program, to the SLURM job scheduler at the SLURM User Group Meeting being held this week. SLURM, an open-source job scheduler originally developed at LLNL and used on the largest systems in the world, is now available with commercial support from SchedMD and is fast becoming the preferred scheduler to use for academic research computing. Jackie will also be giving a tutorial on using Berkeley Lab NHC (Node Health Check) with SLURM.
Outage Details
Date
Impact
Researchers at the ALS used “soft” X-rays to image structures only five nanometers in size. This resolution is the highest ever achieved with X-ray microscopy and may have ushered in a new era for nanoscale imaging. Diffraction data is recorded by a high speed CCD camera and fed through a Data Pipeline consisting of a 43K GPU core infiniband LInux cluster, a high speed 10 gigabit network and a Data Transfer Node running Globus Online implemented by the High Performance Computing Services Group. Read more.
IT is proud to launch a 1 year pilot of COS Pivot, a tool for finding funding opportunities. The tool indexes over 20,000 opportunities and presents them in a searchable database. It can also match funding opportunities automatically based on profiles established and edited in the system.
Additional information will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime, feel free to begin to use this tool:
http://go.lbl.gov/pivot (Access from LBL IP space will allow full searching of the database, create an account using your LBL email address to unlock additional functionality).
New version deployed on July 31
We made some changes to the phonebook after reviewing customer feedback.
The screen shot below reflects the new look will surface later Thursday afternoon
The Labs phonebook (directory look-up) service is undergoing some changes. It incorporates some of the more advanced search techniques in the new "Elasticsearch" back-end engine.
By default, the phonebook performs a Basic search and sorts the results by name. If you're coming from the old directory search application and still trying to use its more limited set of functionality, you may be interested in sticking with the Basic search option.
Phonebook help can be found here. The more advanced capabilities of the new search tool are explained.
Elasticsearch is "a flexible and powerful open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine". For more information on this tool, go here.
A new Windows client from Fuze is now available - go to fuze.com/download to install it.
The Fuze client is installed on 46 Video Cart/Office Systems (the Mac Version) - and with the release of the latest Windows client a unified look and feel is consistent across laptop and desktop systems.
Usage trends are shown below
The IT Division is moving into a second phase of testing related to UberConference. This product offers capabilities similar to Readytalk with useful Google integration opportunities. In our prior tests, we were just using the free version. We now have 75 PRO licenses that allow you to pick your own conference phone number (e.g. 510 area code), have up to 100 attendees, and provides a dial-out service. Phase II testing lasts until August 15, 2014.
Lab users can request a test account by entering a help request at help.lbl.gov.
Our FAQ is here
Doodle premium service now available for LBL employees
We have acquired a one year subscription to doodle's premium service to help "power" calendar users find appropriate times for hard to schedule guests.
Doodle is particularly useful when trying to find times that accommodate a mix of lab and non lab guests. (It is possible to allow an integration with Google calendar so the times you choose for a poll can be done via Gcal.)
Update: 6/26/14
Wireless access points at LBL that support eduroam include 33, 50E, 50F, 65,70, 70A, 65A, 65B, 88, 90 & 90 trailers. The current list of buildings with this support can be found at the Wireless - Upgraded page.
We have begun initial testing of our EDUROAM wireless implementation and invite lab employees who have an interest to try it out.
Eduroam (education roaming) is the secure wireless access service developed for the international research and education community. We have started to make this available to travelers who come to the lab (Bldg 50F was our first installation - and future growth depends on the modernization of our wireless infrastructure which is in progress). The primary reason we decided to pursue this project is because of the advantage it gives our employees when on travel - eduroam has been installed all over the world (54 countries according the eduroam web site). When a lab laptop or mobile device is configured (see our faq), accessing eduroam will result in an authentication against the labs enterprise directory - no matter which eduroam site you may be at.
The SSID for LBL's test implementation is eduroam. This network is currently in test mode as of 6/11/14 with limited availability in the IT space in Building 50 F. The IT Networking Group will expand this network once the planning stage is complete. The next set of buildings will include 50E, 65, 65a, 70, 88 and 90 (in late June)
The LBL FAQ on our implementation is here.
Eduroam's web site is at eduroam.org
Wikipedia's summary can be found here.
The IT Division is offering two identical Advanced Arduino workshops from 9am-12pm and 1pm-4pm on Tuesday, June 24 in Pers Hall (54-130). Registration can be found on our “Training and Awareness” webpage located here:
https://commons.lbl.gov/display/itdivision/Training+and+Awareness
The class will introduce advanced concepts, focusing on sensors, actuators, and programming techniques that might be used to monitor or control equipment. Topics to include:
- Sensors using the SPI and 12C interfaces
- LCD interface using a 4 bit parallel port
- How to set and read a real time clock with battery backup
- How to use IR for control (via TV remote) or communication between Arduinos
- How to filter and smooth sensor values
- How to program a servo loop to keep an actuator within a target range
Requirements: Basic familiarity with Arduino software and hardware (i.e., know how to modify and upload a program, understand basic programming concepts, know how to use a solderless breadboard to connect simple sensors and actuators to Arduino). A laptop with Arduino installed and known to function correctly (i.e., can compile and upload sketches to Uno).
Arduino kits and all other necessary materials will be provided for use during the workshop or you may bring your own. Kits are also available for purchase with a valid PID.
We also offer a variety of classes from beginner to intermediate levels in Excel and specialized Excel/PPT courses focusing on data analysis and presentation of financials. For more details on our training course offerings, click on our training link above.
Public Affairs, supported by IT, launched their new Home Suite (www, today at berkeley lab, newscenter) over the weekend. A few notable technical features include:
- Responsive Design: The site dynamically adjusts to the size of your screen, reconfiguring itself for readability and usability from smartphone to widescreen monitor. To see how it responds, just drag the right edge of your browser to make it more narrow and watch the menus collapse and reconfigure themselves to the width of the screen. Some adjustments can only be viewed on mobile devices. For example, on a mobile device you'll see the addition of a top menu item called "Directions to Lab" which provides easy access to maps and directions when you're on the go.
- Content Management System: We're a high tech, early adopter sort of place at LBL but sometimes we stick with what works for awhile. While the lab has probably had instances of virtually every big open source content management system over the past decade, we've never used a CMS on our main www.lbl.gov site. In fact, much of the directory hierarchy of our main site had remained unchanged since it was stood up as one of the first 250 sites on the nascent world wide web (we think we were actually in the first 100, but the exact numbers are lost in the mists of internet history). Among the things in our now preserved but unshared /web/ directory was a list of "the other sites on the www"! We chose Wordpress for our CMS and there are a number of reasons we're excited about it as a platform going forward. See more about this below.
- IPv6: Our new www.lbl.gov supports ipv6, an important step as the world transitions to the new standard to accommodate future internet growth.
So what does this mean for you? Well, in addition to having a cleaner homepage to look at (we hope you feel this way), we're excited to begin offering Wordpress hosting, templates, and support to the broader laboratory community. Procurement.lbl.gov is already making use of early release templates and JGI and PBD are making use of our hosting services. Check back soon for more info on how Wordpress fits in to our content and collaboration offerings and how to engage the set of services that will be offered by IT and CSO.
We're excited to have launched the new search.lbl.gov portal powered by Google Custom Search. We've been impressed by the results but we need your help to tune and improve it. Try your searches and use the feedback link at the bottom of the search page to tell us about what worked and what didn't.
As part of a plan to reduce manual effort by the HR Shared Services new hire onboarding team, our collaboration team, and the IT Help desk - we deployed some new automated processes for Account Creation on May 15, 2014. We offer three types of services: An Enterprise Directory Account (sometimes referred to as "LDAP") which everyone gets, a Google account, and an Active Directory Account for Windows File and Print services (network shares are also access by Mac Users).
What's Changed?
1. We are disconnecting the idea of an enterprise directory (LDAP) username from a Google account. (We were creating too many Google accounts when all that really needed was an "ldap" account to log into a system like JHA). Google Accounts provide a lab email address and access to other core products (calendar, drive/docs, sites) and these services are generally not required by affiliates.
2. We create enterprise directory usernames automatically for everyone - staff, contract workers and affiliates, using the same logic we were employing in the manual process. These accounts are created when the HR Hire action is completed and an employee number is assigned (usually the evening of the hire date action). Passwords are provided at the badge office or by calling the IT Help Desk. Usernames are unique at LBL - we will not issue one that has been used before.
3. Username choices, in order are:
- FMLastname (JBSmith)
- FLastname (JSmith)
- FirstnameLastname (JoeSmith)
- FirstnameMLastname (JoeMSmith)
- FML (JMS)
- FMLastname## (JBSmith02)
4. We create Google accounts (with the same username) for email, etc for all staff and contract workers. Accounts for affiliates will be ordered by HR Shared Services if selected by the host or designee on the Affiliate Registry when initiating the affiliate appointment.
5. We create Active Directory accounts (with the same username) for all staff and contract workers and start them in a disabled state. They can be enabled when the user calls the HD and asks for their first password. Active Directory is used by most staff employees in Operations and to a lesser extent by Scientific Divisions.
Are you are an affiliate and need an account?
If anyone needs either a Google account or an Active Directory account and one is not automatically created, use the account request form and a ticket will be generated for processing by IT staff. Go to our Lab services portal and follow the link for "commonly requested services"
today.lbl.gov and
newscenter.lbl.gov
will take an unusual scheduled daytime outage from 2-5pm May 23, 2014 for upgrades.
The Phonebook will be available at http://www2.lbl.gov/ds/ during this outage.
On Wednesday, May 14, the Laboratory's voice mail system will be unavailable from 5:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. for system maintenance. During this time, voice mail messages will be unavailable and callers will be unable to leave a message.
Outgoing and incoming calls will not be impacted.
For more information, contact Telephone Services (x7997).
