• High-End Services Section (HSS)

    "CISL's High-End Services Section of NCAR is a world leader in supercomputing for the geosciences, providing services to NCAR and over 60 UCAR member universities in the U.S. and affiliates worldwide."

    The High-End Services Section (HSS) is responsible for systems engineering, administration, and management of the computational and storage resources and services provided by CISL to NCAR and its member institutions.

    Consulting Services Group (CSG)

    The Consulting Services Group focuses on assisting users of the CISL high performance computing facilities. They work to enhance scientific workflow by providing CSG Soars the research community with porting assistance, documentation, and effective strategies for use of high performance computing resources as part of the CISL Division's High-End Services Section (HSS).

    Data Analysis Services Group (DASG)

    The Data Analysis Services Group focuses on the Vapor Graphicdata analysis, data post-processing and visualization users of the NCAR community. They work to enhance scientific workflow by providing the research community with a highly advanced computing environment tailored toward the specialized needs of interactive data post-processing, analysis and visualization.


    Mass Storage Services Group (MSSG)

    December 10, 2008

    AMSTAR is BornAMSTAR is Born

    NCAR's Augmentation of the Mass Storage Tape Archive Resources (AMSTAR), is "a massive newdigital storage library that will preserve and protect valuable scientific data for thenext 15 to20 years.

    Robots inside NCAR's new AMSTAR digital storage library responding to commands to fetch and mount tape Robots inside AMSTARcartridges for reading and/or writing. About halfway into the video, a robot scans the barcode labels on tapes within the library as part of the initial tape inventory process."

    The Mass Storage Services Group is responsible for maintaining all of the software and hardware associated with NCAR's Mass Storage System. This includes all of the server software that runs on the z/890 mainframe (known as the Mass Storage Control Processor, or MSCP), as well as, all of the internal MSS server software that supports DCS, the Storage Manager, and the Fibre Channel "data network". The MSS Group also maintains the host software that runs on all of SCD's supercomputers and many other servers that provide direct access to MSS devices utilizing the "third-party transfer" mechanism.

    In addition to maintaining the existing infrastructure, the MSS Group also designs and develops new software to accommodate the exponential growth of the MSS archive, and continuously upgrades the MSS to take advantage of the latest disk, tape, and automated tape library technologies.


    Supercomputer Services Group (SSG)

    The Supercomputer Services Group is responsible for system engineering and software development in support of the installation, configuration, administration, and maintenance of all production NCAR supercomputer holdings that are under the stewardship of CISL.

    The current supercomputer holdings consist of eight production clusters: two IBM POWER5, three IBM POWER4, two IBM Linux, and one Aspen Systems Linux. In total, there are over 400 nodes/operating system images, four interconnect architectures, three operating system types, and two storage subsystems.