Computing Resources at ODU CS

The Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University offers a wide array of facilities, resources, and services to our faculty, staff, students and guests. The assets are distributed between Dragas Hall and the Engineering and Computational Sciences Building (E&CS). This system architecture enables our services to be configured in a redundant/highly-available manner. This stability and resiliency is essential to maintaining a high level of service to over 2,300 users.

E&CS Building

The E&CS building is home to our primary datacenter and main administrative office. It also houses several of our research labs, a state-of-the-art multimedia conference room, multiple classrooms, our network operations center, and our Open Research Lab (OR Lab). The OR Lab is one of our two labs that are available to all CS students; the other is the Problem Solving Lab (PS Lab) located in Dragas Hall. Both of these labs are open during regular business hours with on-site lab monitors and may be accessed 24/7 by request via BASIS managed proxy cards. They are equipped

with the latest mid-ranged Intel based workstations. These machines utilize a minimum configuration of Intel Core 2 Quad processors operating at 2.8 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, up to an Intel Core i7 at 3.4 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. There are also several Macintosh based systems. Dragas Hall also contains several instructional and research labs, our satellite administrative office, secondary conference room, redundant datacenter, extended network operations center, and support staff offices.

High Level Networking Diagram

Our network is utilizing a redundant configuration of 10Gig and 1Gig fiber-optic connections between buildings with multiple paths out to the WAN provided by the University. Each datacenter contains multiple 10Gig interconnected servers for our heavily used services and a minimum 1Gig connection to the remaining servers and workstations. Various VLANs are used to segment the network, isolate traffic, and enforce security policies. Our 100% wireless coverage allows users to take advantage of A, B, G, and N secure connections from either of our buildings. VPN access is available for remote users to

access services on our network. All departmental telephone communication is provided via VoIP Avaya phone systems.

We offer a heterogeneous computing environment that primarily consists of Windows and *nix based workstations and servers. On the Windows domain, users are offered network logons, Exchange email, terminal services via our Virtual Computing Lab (VCLab) where users can have access to our software remotely, roaming profiles, MSSQL database access for research, and Hyper-V virtualization for research/faculty projects. For Unix and Linux users we support Solaris, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distributions. Our *nix services include DNS, NIS, Unix mail, access to personal MySQL databases, class and research project Oracle databases, and both Linux and Unix based FAST aliases for secure shell sessions.

A view of our clusters

In addition to the standard *nix services, High Performance Computing resources are offered to users in the form

of multiple Intel-based Rocks HPC clusters, which boast high-speed Infiniband QDR interconnects and top out at a combined 3.5 TFLOPS. A Beowulf cluster is available for use in distributed computing classes. We also offer several GPU servers utilizing the newest CUDA paradigms, and a virtual Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) server with 64 physical cores and 512Gb of memory.

Storage for a majority of these resources is redundantly provided via two EMC Celerra NAS devices, one located in each datacenter. This design allows for replication of storage across the network to ensure high availability. These systems provide a combined total of 100Tb of storage and dozens of file systems. Users are provided with CIFS and NFS mounts for use in both windows and *nix environments. We also use these devices to provide iSCSI targets for our VM environments. Research users are allocated storage based on project needs and availability. All user data is backed up multiple times per day as snapshots on our EMC devices and maintained onsite for up to two years on tape.

Additional services provided include, but are not limited to, user web pages, on-demand virtual machines through our Cloud services, copy and print services, audio-visual broadcasting and recording, teleconferencing, and 24/7 end user helpdesk and support.