EECS RESEARCH COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT SUMMARY

July 1st, 2005.

The EECS Research computing infrastructure, currently limited to Cory and Soda Halls, consists of the following areas and services:

1. Wired network infrastructure has two core routers, one in each building, each with a backbone of 128 Gb/s. The connection between the two buildings is two redundant, loading balancing 1 Gb fiber. For each building, every floor has multiple switches, each with 64 Gb/s backplanes. Our standard port connectivity is 100 Mb/s, although 1 Gb/s port to the desktop is available. Connectivity to the campus (and rest of the world) is done via a pair of 1 Gb load-sharing pipes. EECS provides its own internal networking and all related networking services and support, such as DNS, monitoring, performance tuning, etc.
2. Production (1500+ active nodes) wireless (802.11x) infrastructure throughout the two buildings, satellite offices, the neighboring streets and coffee shops. We have recently expanded our coverage to include both the campus production wireless service within our buildings, as well as a mesh coverage of the NE quadrant of the UC Berkeley main campus
3. Production Unix and Windows 2000/XP/2003 platforms, with a total registered system count of more than 5000.
4. Integrated user account services, with fully deployed LDAP based user database supporting some 1500+ user accounts (both Unix and Windows), enterprise IMAP mail, calendaring and scheduling.
5. A centralized storage of approximately 5TB (all on highly available, redundant and high performance servers), with daily backup and offsite disaster recovery service. Of this, about 3 TB are research data, the rest home directory and email spools. Our critical servers uptime in general exceed 99.97%.
6. Centralized EECS helpdesk to provide web based FAQ and support for all instructional and research users.
7. General Unix login and compute service for all research users.
8. Software libraries are available for all supported Unix platforms (precompiled software packages). All Microsoft development and commercial software tools available thru EECS Windows and MacOS X software servers.
9. Department-wide license server for commercial software, such as Matlab, Mathematica, Allegro CL, Office XP, etc.
10. A support staff of 38, ranging from user desktop and server system administration service, infrastructrue and application support, application and database development, networking support, helpdesk, etc.
11. Summary of EECS Instructional labs computing environment (PDF).