Winter 2005 System Updates

• Odin, Tyr, and Woton Clusters - Two new computing clusters, Odin and Tyr, are now online with a third, Woton, being brought on-line. Odin contains 128 Dual AMD Opteron systems with 4GB of memory running Gentoo Linux. Tyr contains 16 Dual AMD Opteron systems with 16GB of memory each also running Gentoo Linux. The Odin and Tyr clusters share 3.5TB of SAN disk storage. The Woton cluster is being configured and consists of 16 dual PowerPC Apple XServe G5s running Mac OS X. This equipment represents a $825,000 value purchased with infrastructure support from the National Science Foundation and IU.
  Read more >>

• Server Upgrades - A new Gentoo Linux server, helga, is now on-line for general remote login and cycle-serving for all CS faculty, staff, and grad students. Helga is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with dual 2.8GHz Xeon processors. This make a total of 4 general purpose cycle-serving machines:
  • helga - Dual 2.8GHz Xeon running Gentoo Linux
  • hagar - Dual 3.0GHz Xeon running Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • tank - Dual 2.0GHz 64bit AMD Opteron running Gentoo Linux
  • school - Dual 1.2GHz 64bit Sparc running Solaris

  Please see the Server FAQ Entry for more information about available computing resources.

• New Color Printer - The old ps3 in LH301 has been replaced with a new HP Color Laserjet 5550DN. This new ps3 should be a significant improvement in quality, speed, and reliability over the old one.

• Computer Structures Laboratory - A new platform has been developed for the computer structures laboratory aimed at replacing the current 68040 based systems. The new platform integrates a custom processor board onto a small two wheeled robot called Goofy Giggles. The Texas Instruments MSP430 processor based electronics package was designed and developed over the fall term and 35 robots were constructed over the winter break. Geoffrey Brown is piloting the usage of these platforms in H335 this spring. Texas Instruments donated many of the electronic components and Little Tikes donated 35 of the Goofy Giggles robots.
  More information on the platform >>

• Web Email Address Hiding - We did a little experiment to see how quickly email addresses are being harvested from web pages. We added unique email addresses to the CSG Homepage using both a regular mailto: line and the old tomail cgi script that uses the standard Location/Redirect technique to hide addresses. In less than 24 hours, both addresses had started to receive spam! We have documentation and a new-and-improved CGI script available to help prevent spammers from harvesting your email address from web pages. Please see the FAQ on this topic for information.

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