Distributed systems advances
The Distributed Systems Group (DSG) of SCD provides, maintains, and
administers the necessary computer service infrastructure for the NCAR
community to conduct daily computational activities. Examples of such
service infrastructure are the NCAR electronic mail service,
both Internet and Intranet World Wide Web (WWW) servers, and Domain
Name Service (DNS) for NCAR. Most of these services are provided
transparently to NCAR users. In addition, DSG supports and administers
interactive servers on which to conduct daily activities (e.g., e-mail, text
editing, MSS access), gateway servers that process 50% of supercomputer job
submittals and MSS activity, library access and queries, and computational
service (e.g., Silicon Graphics XL Challenge). The provision of these
services is an ongoing, year-to-year activity for DSG, which continued
these activities through FY1998.
In addition to continuing to provide the above organization-wide services,
DSG's focus for FY1998 was on the following primary areas:
- Consolidating services onto fewer servers
- Using industry-standard software such as Distributed Computing
Environment (DCE) to eventually replace legacy systems, e.g. Mainframe
And Server Network (MASnet) and MASnet/Internet in a production mode
- Increase storage capacity and memory on servers and workstations
- Configure servers with faster network connectivity (e.g., ATM OC-3,
100BaseT Ethernet)
- Integrate distributed management tools
- Head off Year 2000 problems
- Create a more user-friendly computing environment
- Continue to phase out obsolete servers