visitors since 31 May 1999
My "New" Job
I now work on the High Performance Support Group
at LSU. We are implementing a super computing solution using the
IBM SP
(Scaleable POWER Parallel) platform. You might know the IBM SP platform
better as "Deep Blue," the super
computer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov. We have one
frame of our SP cluster dedicated to CASPER
(the Callaway* Advanced Scalable Parallel Environment for Research) environment.
*--Dr. Callaway was instrumental in pushing parallel computing on LSU's campus.
That frame was purchased with money granted from the Louisiana Technology Inovation Fund (LTIF).
I am responsible for the systems administration on the CASPER machine(s). There are 11 nodes in that frame, all running IBM's AIX v4.2.1 UNIX operating system. To more easily manage our user space, we have installed IBM's DCE v2.1 on all the nodes to create one cell, /.../casper.lsu.edu/. We have one master and one backup DCE security node in the cell. We have also implemented IBM's DFS for application binaries as well as user home directory space. There are two dedicated nodes for housing the DFS space. The cell has three interactive nodes, controlled by IBM's LoadLeveler v2.1 product. From these nodes you can use IBM's Parallel Operating Environment (POE) v2.3 to distribute parallel applications to any of our four parallel nodes.
Look here to see just what I do in a day. Or, look here for a current "To-Do" list.
My "Old" Job
I work as a Computer Analyst II for the Office
of Computing Services (OCS) at Louisiana State University.
I spend most of my time fixing "field problems" reported through our campus
HelpDesk.
However, I also am involved in a couple of large scale projects such as
establishing a campus-wide DCE cell and implementing Windows NT at the
campus level.
Our HelpDesk is run by a Lotus Notes database created in-house. Faculty, staff or students can call our number and report a problem. Hopefully, the student worker staff can handle most of the problems, but if they can't a problem is logged to the system. Another analyst (the guy in the next cube to me) assigns the simpler problems to our more trained student workers. The difficult ones get assigned to an analyst who can solve them. That's where I come in!
I've recently completed a database, using Lotus Notes, that tracks all the servers we manage here at OCS. It's a small project, but something I can point to!
Also, I did a Guest Lecture on "Technology in Education" for the Department of Educational Leadership, Research & Counseling (ELRC) 7606 class in the College of Education. Here's the page for that presentation.
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visitors since 31 May 1999