18-Dec-2018

2018: The Year in Review

It has been a year of many changes at CLASSE, with the complete overhaul of the Wilson Lab experimental areas for CHESS-U and CBETA, not to mention many additional research efforts coming online or being developed. And the CLASSE-IT team has been pleased to be a part of it all, whether it's ensuring smooth day-to-day operations for researchers and support staff, providing new networking and data collection capabilities, or supporting the many special events taking place across the lab. Here is a look back at some of the highlights of 2018.

First, a few statistics. From 01-Dec-2017 to 01-Dec-2018, we:

• Responded to over 3,400 new ServiceRequest tickets submitted by 400 different users, generating over 17,000 emails.
• Deployed over 100 desktops, laptops, servers, and experimental control system computers.
• Created over 200 new user accounts.
• Ran over 660,000 jobs submitted to the CLASSE Compute Farm.
• Sent approximately 150,000 pages to our printers.
• Commissioned over 200 TB of disk arrays for data storage.
• Recorded over 1,100 TB of filesystem backups on tape.
• Provided A/V support for over 50 seminars, meetings, conferences, workshops, and other events.

As always, we juggle day-to-day support with long term projects. This year, in addition to upgrading the experimental control systems and network infrastructure for CHESS-U and CBETA, we are simultaneously migrating Linux and Windows operating systems (from Scientific Linux 6 to 7, from Windows 7 to 10) on all of our 1000+ servers and end-user computers. This work will continue for much of 2019.

We have commissioned a high-availability cluster dedicated to virtual machines, as well as AppsAnywhere, a new self-service solution for delivering (virtualized) Windows software to CLASSE-managed computers. For remote access to CLASSE-managed Windows and Mac computers, we now offer a new ScreenConnect service which replaces LogMeIn.

We have also ramped up our development of custom web applications for various groups throughout the lab, including the business office and CHESS. In the process, we deployed a CLASSE GitLab server, which is available for use by anyone doing software development at CLASSE. In 2019, we can look forward to the launch of a new effort-tracking web application that will replace Replicon.

On the personnel front, we celebrated the long careers of Selden Ball and Rich Sholtys, both of whom have been critical to the success of CLASSE over the decades. We wish them both a happy retirement! And we brought on board Marlin Guest as a new CLASSE-IT team member, along with Mike Ryan (who actually joined us in 2017). Welcome to both!

Finally, thanks to everyone at CLASSE for an exciting 2018. Happy holidays, and see you in 2019!

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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