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What do feet sticking out from behind a machine rack have to do with SCD's mission? Click here to find out
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by Lynda Lester
See the photo gallery
On Saturday, 6 April 2002, the basement halls of NCAR's Mesa Laboratory were dark and empty. The sound of distant hammers and whirring fans echoed through the corridors, and the acrid smell of smoke and burnt metal hung in the air.
Inside the Computer Room, shouts echoed back and forth as contractors in welding masks used oxyacetylene torches to cut steel pipes. Electricians installed circuits and pulled wire. SCD staff in t-shirts and baseball caps checked manuals, unscrewed and tightened bolts, and lifted and moved equipment. Servers stood in various states of disassembly, while tool carts blocked the aisles and mazes of tangled fiberoptic cable snaked across the floor.
It was NCAR's semiannual building maintenance shutdown, and SCD was taking the opportunity to make numerous upgrades to NCAR/UCAR computer and network infrastructure.
UPSie daisy
Gary New, facilities engineer in SCD's Operations and Infrastructure Support Section, arrived at 4 a.m. for preventative maintenance and testing on the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). Later that morning he and Aaron Andersen (OIS manager) worked with contractors to tie the UPS into the emergency power-off system so that in an emergency (e.g., an electrical fire), power to the Computer Room can be abruptly terminated without the UPS generators kicking in.
Aaron also supervised welders in the Computer Room who added new cooling pipes under the floor in preparation for installation of a second chiller, to be installed in May 2002. The chiller, part of the room's air conditioning system, will service the expanding cluster of IBM computers in NCAR's Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS).
Also assisting with hardware upgrades was facilities engineer Stan McLaughlin who, a few days later, worked with Gary to install a new platform to extend the working area of the Computer Room operators.
Servers with a smile
SCD's Distributed Systems Group (DSG) turned out in force, relocating and upgrading servers that provide web authentication, gateway, and email service to UCAR. Mark Uris (group head), Ed Arnold, Bob Campbell, John Fox, Scott "Buzz" Hays, and Herb Poppe consolidated the servers -- which had been spread out in a functional but cluttered array -- into two efficient racks, removing a number of keyboards and monitors and setting up a switch to control the multiple machines. They also made a number of system enhancements and performed various hardware and software upgrades.
Net gain
Meanwhile, technicians and engineers from SCD's Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section were busy reconfiguring network connections. Jeff Alipit, Fabian Guerrero, Del Harris, Mike Martinez, Jerome Martinez, David Mitchell, Rick Mumford, Pete Siemsen, and Jim Van Dyke worked most of the day to simplify and optimize the Computer Room's network configuration. They rerouted and shortened a hundred cables, removed an the old Ethernet switch, and installed a new, dedicated Cisco Catalyst switch next to the new server racks. (For more photos, see "Switching switches.")
Mission critical
The NCAR Computer Room is a sophisticated and complex facility requiring constant maintenance and improvement. Upgrading the hardware, software, and network infrastructure is for SCD a critical aspect of its mission, which is to provide a high-performance computing environment that emphasizes user productivity. The enhancements made by SCD during the Spring 2002 building maintenance shutdown will improve the computing exerience for NCAR's atmospheric researchers.
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