Progress Report for the Millennium Project: Department of Geology and Geophysics

By Douglas Dreger

 

August 13, 1998

 

During the first year of the Millennium project the Department of Geology and Geophysics has completed the necessary modifications to our computer network to integrate the new Millennium desktop computers. Also during this time our building, McCone Hall, has been undergoing significant interior and seismic renovation. On July 15, 1998 we regained access to our new Instructional Computer Laboratory (ICL) which will house the new desktop machines. The first shipment of 6 desktop machines was received on August 7, 1998. When the remaining 5 are received we will connect them all to the building Ethernet, which will also be upgraded. We have secured funding from NSF to support our Systems Administrator, Charley Paffenbarger, who will be responsible for the receipt, installation, and configuration of the new hardware, as well as provide operations/maintenance and software support. In addition, we have secured NSF funding for a general upgrade of our building Ethernet to 100Mbit/s switched hubs and routers. This network supports the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Geophysics Computer Laboratory (GCL) and the ICL.

 

The planned use of the ICL is both as an instructional laboratory for general classes in computational aspects of the earth sciences and also as a mini-cluster to use to develop parallel software. Software developed on the Departments desktop and distributed Sun and HP network will be used on the NOW cluster we have access to in EECS, and of course, on the general Millennium cluster. The current plan is to run Microsoft NT on the desktop machines and use PVM or MPI protocols on our distributed network which includes the 11 Intel machines we are due to receive and the network of Sun Ultra Sparcs and HP workstations on the GCL and Seismological Laboratory subnets.

 

There is no research progress to report at this time as we have only received the first 6 machines on August 7, 1998, however Professors Richards and Dreger have immediate plans to port existing fluid dynamics, frequency-wave number integration, and finite difference codes to the new system when it becomes operational. In their role as a teaching lab the new computers will be used in several courses in the coming semester.