This is the September, 2001 newsletter of the ITC Research Computing Support Group. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the information presented here please contact the ITC Research Computing Support Group via e-mail to res-consult@virginia.edu, or at the Research Computing Support Center, 244 Wilson Hall, 243-8800. The Research Computing Support Center is open 9AM-5PM, Monday through Friday.
The schedule of talks has been changed from 12:00 to 1:15 PM to 3:30 to 4:45 PM. The schedule for the remaining session is:
The aim of these talks is to provide new and current researchers with an overview and details about ITC computing resources that may help them to get a quicker start on their research and do their computing more efficiently. Researchers will also be able to pick up copies of software distributed by the ITC Research Computing Support Group such as SAS, Matlab, IDL, etc. after each talk. Each talk is an independent session, just attend the talks that are of interest to you. The talks are at the Research Computing Support Center (RCSC), 244 Wilson. Coffee and soda will be provided.
The talk given Tuesday (9/11) on Introduction to ITC and an Overview of the Hardware and Storage facilities provided at U.Va. will be repeated in October if interest is expressed in doing so.
If you have any comments, suggestions or questions please e-mail res-consult@virginia.edu
Hosted by the UVA Office of Information Technologies in cooperation with the Dean's Technology Council and the Academic Computing Advisory Council
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2001 Newcomb Hall - Commonwealth Room 1:30 4:00PM Open to UVa Faculty, Researchers, Graduate Students & Staff
Featured Speakers:
Robert F. Sproull, Sun Vice President & Fellow
Conrad Geiger, U.S. Academic 7 Research Computing Region High
Performance Computing Technical Specialist at Sun
Robert F. Sproull, Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, will discuss Sun's methods of developing new technologies. One ingredient is Sun Microsystems Laboratories, an applied research lab in which Sproull directs the Massachusetts branch. The lab and its technology transfer mechanisms initiated both Java and SunRay product developments. Another important ingredient is a program of collaborative research projects, in which focussed research projects in universities are connected to Sun research or engineering projects. These collaborations stress the ties between principals at Sun and in academia.
Sproull joined Sun in 1990 to start a Massachusetts branch of Sun Labs. Since undergraduate days, he has been building hardware and software for computer graphics: clipping hardware, an early device-independent graphics package, page description languages, laser printing software, and window systems. He has also been involved in VLSI design, especially of asynchronous circuits and systems. Before joining Sun, he was a principal with Sutherland, Sproull & Associates, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a coauthor with William Newman of the early text, "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics." He is an author of the recently published book "Logical Effort," which deals with designing fast CMOS circuits. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.
Conrad Geiger is the U.S. Academic & Research Computing Region HPC Technical Specialist for Sun. Conrad first joined Sun Microsystems in 1987 and has worked exclusively with Sun's academic and research customers for the last five years. From 1989-1993 Conrad worked for NeXT Computer.
Conrad has been involved with several of Sun's Center of Excellence customers including the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) both utilizing Sun solutions such as Grid, portal and HPC ClusterTools much of which has been donated to the open source community for free customer download.
Among other topics Conrad will share with the University of Virginia is information regarding Sun's technology collaborative partner relationships at OSC, SDSC, Australian National University, University of Aachen (Germany), and EPCC (Edinburgh, Scotland Parallel Computing Center).
He will speak of how these research institutions' usage of Sun's architecture and tools have helped solve many of their user and infrastructure issues by providing seamless management of mass storage and backup, appropriate high-level technical support and system administration with limited resources, and user/department/project guaranteed compute and memory access as well as network bandwidth.
Conrad is a graduate of the University of Texas with further science studies at the University of Washington and the University of Colorado.
Maple version 6.01 is available as maple.old for the text or batch version and xmaple.old for the gui version.
If you have any questions or concerns about this transition, please email res-consult@virginia.edu
Details on what's new in both SAS 8.0 and SAS 8.2 may be found at
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/manuals/sas82/whatsnew.pdf
The oldest version of SAS, version 6.12, formerly accessed with the command "sasold" on the RS/6000s (e.g., blue.unix, avery.med) can no longer be accessed in the usual way.
SAS 6.12 catalog files have names of the form *.sct01. The formatting in these catalogs cannot be recovered with SAS 8.x. To remedy this problem, SAS 6.12 is being made available to individuals in this situation for the purpose of making the conversion to SAS catalogs (and data sets where needed). You must migrate your catalog files from version 6 by mid-October. For details and instructions on this task, you may visit the Research Computing Support Center in Wilson Hall, Room 244, call at804-243-8800, or send email to res-consult@virginia.edu
For more information and assistance on using SAS at the U.Va., visit:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/sashelp.htm
Further information on how to access Matlab 6.1 from either a Unix workstation
or a PC, as well as help using Matlab, can be found on the Research Computing
Services Web page at,
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/matlab.html
Users who have an older version (5.x) of Matlab installed locally on their computer may have to download the new license.dat file from the above Web page if they choose to maintain the older version.
Specific questions about the upgrade as well general questions concerning as the use of Matlab should be directed to res-consult@virginia.edu.
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