Dear Acropolis and Athens Users:
Beginning June 16th at 5PM Central Time through June 18th, SSCS will upgrade and migrate the Athens server, Acropolis Cluster, and associated storage. Services will be relocated from their current home in Saieh Hall to ITServices’ 1155 Data Center. These dates, right at the conclusion of the Spring Quarter, have been selected due to historical usage of the system, and to prepare for additional improvements before Autumn Quarter. A previous move of related SSD computing hardware from the KBG server room was successfully accomplished in December 2020.
My team and I are available to answer any questions and to provide assurance that these changes are thoroughly planned and will be closely monitored. The upgrade will provide you and your research teams with access to higher speed storage and improved network speeds . The move ensures SSD’s ability to grow, to adapt to new computing, and to take advantage of the best computational resources available to the University.
Benefits:
This move brings SSD servers into closer proximity to those of the Research Computing Center’s Midway2 and Midway3 environments. RCC and SSCS continue to work toward lowering the barriers between computing systems in order to provide the best-available resources to SSD researchers.
The move also secures enhanced power feeds, cooling, and 24×7 in-person support for the hardware.
In addition, this upgrade will allow researchers additional tools for accessing their storage, including SSDLab, a virtualized Windows Desktop system developed by Lucas Coady’s team within SSCS. With SSDLab, researchers can utilize Windows-only software such as ArcGIS over a high-speed network against data also available to SSD Servers and Acropolis. The SSDLab is also being developed with an eye toward inclusion in the Secure Data Enclave, a resource jointly developed by ITServices and RCC.
The above upgrades represent the culmination of significant investment from the Social Sciences Division, and years of effort between SSCS and ITServices to address findings of a jointly initiated audit of risks to business continuity and security.
Please let me know of any questions or concerns at Bart Longacre blongacr@uchicago.edu.