The ING Newsletter No. 1, September 1999
GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION TELESCOPE TIME
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News from the Computing Facilities GroupNick Johnson (Head of CFG, ING)
1999 is a busy year for the Computing Facilities Group (CFG) as we simultaneously roll out improvements to network bandwidth, processing speed and storage capacity to ready ING for the next millennium. Did I mention Y2K compliance? Yes, we too will be ready for the New Year.
This year we are installing large network switches into the WHT and INT to carry ten times more capacity between our telescopes. Each building is being recabled completely, from telescope control rooms and their data acquisition systems all the way to offices and their word processing systems. The result is a managed network where the CFG team can monitor the health of every computer, printer, hub and switch within ING. Pre-emptive fault diagnosis means we now call users and tell them of any problems, usually before they have noticed.
Upgrading to Sun Ultra 10 computers for all telescope data acquisition, reduction and instrument control is well under way. The INT now boasts one of the fastest workstations in the Canary Islands with its dual processor Sun Ultra 60 and 1GB of RAM, which offer a tenfold increase in performance for reduction of WFC data. In a year, we will be using the same type of computers throughout all the telescopes making system management easier, and substitution easier should faults occur. Single point of failures in the networked file server system have been identified and by the end of the year, every important network service will have custom primary and secondary servers.
A new astronomical data capture and archiving system is being installed so that all images are routed around a dedicated private network, guaranteed free of any data traffic generated by other users. The destination for the images is a new set of DVD Towers that increase the capacity of our current system seven fold.
Data communications to the mainland are being improved with the installation of ISDN standby routers to provide diverse routing of our data paths. Satellite links direct to the UK and Netherlands Internet Service Providers and universities are also being investigated. Our internal and external webservers are being replaced, ready for an overhaul of the ING website. Our vigilance of our computer systems has increased following the growth of malicious use of the Internet in the last year. Our aim is security without handcuffs. Users will have to learn to use new applications, yet not lose the basic flexibility and network performance that they have come to expect.
Email contact: Nick Johnson (nrj@ing.iac.es)
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GENERAL SCIENCE TELESCOPES AND INSTRUMENTATION TELESCOPE TIME © Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes