Review of Computing Services
School of GeoSciences – March 2006
The School of GeoSciences was formed in August 2002 from the former Department of Geology & Geophysics, the Department of Geography, the Institute of Ecology and Resource Management, the Institute of Meteorology and the Centre for Environmental Change and Sustainability. The school is currently spread across three locations at KB and one in the town centre. Three institutes have been established to devolve management of site-specific issues and as a reflection of the diverse discipline base ranging from the social sciences in Geography through to Geophysics. Research developments and support are coordinated through the Research Strategy Group (RSG) while support requirements are provided through the Teaching Organisation (TO), Graduate Organisation (GO) and Technical and Computing Services (TCS). Each of these support strands is led by a an academic who are members of the School Executive Group along with 3 Heads of Institute, Head of School and the School Administrator. The Head of TCS is supported by a Deputy Head with the responsibility for Technical Services and Computing split between them. The Deputy Head of TCS currently leads the Computing Service, convenes the IT committee and is the representative from the school on the College Computing and Information Technology Committee. The IT Service Manager (ITSM) undertakes operational management of the Service, provides advice to the academic head of Computing and manages the IT budget.
The IT committee meets 3 or 4 times per year to consider issues of policy relating to computing. The membership consists of:
· convener (currently Deputy Head of TCS)
· Director of Technical and Computing Services
· IT Service Manager
· Infrastructure Services Leader
· Specialist Services Leader
· Head of Teaching Organisation
· Head of Graduate Organisation
· Head of Research Strategy Group
· School Administrator
· Postgraduate Representative
· Undergraduate Representative
The terms of reference for the IT Committee and Service were agreed in March 2004 and are available in full at http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/admin/CWG/itsc040305pa.html. In summary, the mission for the IT Service is:
· To ensure the IT resources and infrastructure are up to the task of delivering the School’s mission to be pre-eminent in teaching and research;
· To liaise with School Executive Group on matters of IT policy and resources to achieve the goals set out by SEG;
· To inform and influence college and university policy on IT to gain maximum benefit from IT for the School;
· To ascertain the needs of users and School operational units (TO, RSG, GO and Institutes) and to obtain these resources and to deliver them;
· To advise school staff of, and implement, university and college initiatives in computing e.g. managed desktop, e-learning.
The strategic plans of the IT service are aimed at enabling research and teaching, reducing administrative load on academic staff and supporting efficient administration of school resources. These are reflected in the range of services described in 3 below. Formulation and implementation of strategy has been delayed by the understaffing of IT support after the school was formed. This arose from loss of two areas of support equivalent to 1.2FTE which were purchased from EUCS and were withdrawn in December 2002 and July 2003. This shortfall was met with 2 appointments, one in June 2005 on infrastructure support and one in August 2005 on specialist support. Integration and harmonisation of services across the school was slower than planned and the final stage of replacing older services is nearing completion.
The IT team now consists of 9 staff and some additional input and is equivalent to 8.8 FTE in total. It is described in 2.1
Monitoring of progress is performed by the IT Service Manager, the IT Committee and the School Administrator. We do not currently have formal performance indicators or quality assurance processes at present.
Financial management is carried out by the IT Service Manager in conjunction with the Deputy Head of Technical and Computing Services and the School Administrator. Salary budget management rests with the School Administrator.
Relationship with central services
Internal communication within the IT team is good, particularly within the office shared by the five members based at KB. Regular team meetings have been instigated on alternate Thursdays preceding the Windows meetings (see 4). The team has recently set up eGroupware to manage projects and to allocate and track resources. The Call Management System (CMS) provided by EUCS is used to manage requests for assistance from users and to monitor progress on solutions. The preferred route for help requests is via email, and there are support phone numbers in Grant Institute and Drummond Street. Personal callers are welcome during helpdesk hours; 10:00-12:00 and 14:00-16:00. The school web-site contains support information but much of the information is old and requires to be updated.
Communication outwith the School is being hampered by other parts of the University ignoring the Desktop Consistency Policy agreed by C&IT in 2002 on the exchange of information. This recommends use of ASCII text, HTML or PDF as appropriate for the material being distributed. Many documents issued by University and College Administration are distributed in Microsoft Word or Excel format and this is a continual source of frustration for users who generally use Linux or Unix.
The IT team is led by the IT Service Manager who is responsible for management of the team, policy and advice to the IT committee, budget and monitoring. The team is split into 3 broad areas, with the core skills of the team members indicated below:
· IT Service Manager (AD5) – Database development, GIS
· Infrastructure
o Infrastructure Services Leader (AD4) – Linux/Unix system configuration
o Desktop Services (AD3) – Windows system and application configuration
o Infrastructure Services (AD2) – Linux system and application configuration; security
o Infrastructure Services (AD2) – Windows system and application deployment
· Specialist
o Specialist Services Leader (AD3) – Remote Sensing and Image Processing, GIS, Seismic Interpretation, Data Management
o Specialist Services (AD2) – Modelling; Visualisation; Data Management; Linux Clustering
· Administration/Teaching
o Administrative Services (AD2) – Database and administrative application development
o eLearning Support (AD2) – eLearning support; course material packaging and delivery
The success of the recent SAGES initiative will see the addition of two computing officers with specific responsibility for supporting model development and will add to the Specialist Team.
The organisation of the team shows specific areas of responsibilities for each individual but in practice all members of the team are involved in the support for end users and may contribute to support in areas where they have specific expertise, particularly in respect of research.
Much of the staff training takes places as part of daily activities through the use of web resources, documentation and communication with other computing officers within the school and University. Where training in specific software is required this is acquired through training courses generally provided by the software vendor. Staff development and performance management are due for review.
The network infrastructure is managed by EUCS but purchased from school funds. Connection to the desks is mostly via 100Mb/s switched UTP with 1Gb/s links to higher level switches and to EDLAN which carries traffic between GeoSciences sites and with the rest of the University. Primary servers are connected at 1Gb/s. Old 10Mb/s switches and repeaters are due to be replaced by May 2006.
The school provides teaching and research labs on each of sites as follows (age of machines in brackets):
· Drummond A – 42 Windows PC (2004/2005)
· Drummond B – 15 Windows PC (2005) + 1 Unix (1998)
· Grant A – 22 Windows PC (1999)
· Grant Seismic – 7 Windows PC (2006) + 7 Linux PC (2006)
· Crew MSc – 12 Windows/Linux PC (2006)
The Drummond Street site also benefits from the presence of a centrally managed 24 hour access lab with 60 Windows PC seats (2002).
The school manages xxx PCs of which xxx run Windows and xx Linux, xx UNIX workstations and xx Macs. This desktop provision is supported by 8 NAS servers with 20Tb of space of which 10Tb is directly allocated to users. Data is replicated to servers on different sites to provide resilience. xx servers act as compute resources, mostly Intel XEON based but with some AMD Opteron. The majority of these have recently been reorganised into a cluster with resource management by ? and monitoring carried out by Ganglia. There are 3 Sun Enterprise 450 servers running Solaris which are due to be retired.
Network and server resources are based in one room on each site which is set aside for that purpose. Apart from the server and lab space identified above, the only other accommodation associated with the IT service is office space for staff. This consists of 3 offices in Drummond Street, shared with 3 other staff, one office and one helpdesk office in Grant Institute.
Although the school makes use of open standards and open-source software, much of the software needed to support administration, research and teaching is proprietary and a significant proportion of the IT budget is allocated to maintaining these licenses. Site licenses are used where appropriate with the school contributing to University-wide licenses in proportion to the number of staff in the school. The Microsoft Campus Licenses has recently moved onto this basis. Many of the licenses are negotiated through CHEST and are therefore subject to restrictions on use for commercial or consultancy purposes. Where site licenses are not available, individual licenses are purchased as required. Special arrangements are sometimes made with software vendors where packages are required for teaching, for example Kingdom Seismic Software, Schlumberger Geoframe Seismic Software.
[SD1]Configuring and packaging software applications for delivery to Windows desktops is a significant drain on resources. Where possible, we use the Desktop Services Team for applications which may be deployed more widely than the school. For software which is largely used within the school, we hold a licence for the packaging tool used by EUCS. Some major applications require considerable trial and error to configure correctly due to the way in which the installation is done and the potential for conflict with other applications on a machine.
The primary stakeholders are:
· Academic staff (c95 including emeritus staff)
· Research staff (c80)
· Postgraduate students (c250 including MSc)
· Undergraduate students (c1100)
· Support staff (c70)
· Teaching organisation
· Graduate organisation
The school teaches a broad range of 20 honours degree courses (BSc and MA), including 9 joint degrees and there are 14 courses leading to Diploma/MSc which have a taught component. Courses within the school are also taken by a significant number of students from other degree programmes. IT features as a core skill in several areas both in generic terms and with a specialist slant in particular courses. Teaching and support material for many courses is available in electronic form. The use of IT in the delivery of teaching material and in enhancing the learning process is an increasing and significant development. Such material includes student-led practicals and on-line assessment, and is developed with the support of a dedicated member of IT staff. A University funded project is nearing completion to develop on-line resources to support field-trips to Iceland, utilising video, still images and other material captured during the field trip last year. These developments are building on central resources such as WebCT, streaming media services and the learning objects repository.
Research activity varies across the spectrum from social issues, policy, environmental monitoring and modelling etc. The common IT strands are based on document processing, email, web-based research, electronic publications, managing bibliographies and preparing presentations. Specialist requirements range from survey analysis and interpretation using both quantitative and qualitative analysis packages, multi-media resources, geographical information science, remote-sensing, seismic interpretation, real-time monitoring of environmental processes, modelling and visualisation. Some modelling activities require high performance computing resources and the management of large volumes of disparate sets of data, many with a spatial component in either 2 or 3 dimensions and often with a temporal component. New research grants are likely to involve considerable IT support in terms of computational and storage resources and in specialist support. A common component is the management of large volumes of data with one project planning to generate 30Tb over a one year period.
Since the school has been formed from 5 units with a wide variety of approaches to managing its research and teaching, IT has been identified as a key tool in unifying and streamlining procedures and maximising the opportunities for making best use of the staff resources available. Best practice from within and outside the school is being identified and adopted as standard procedures using school databases to supplement services available from college and the University. New systems are being specified and implemented where appropriate. The school web-site has been developed using Zope to provide a consistent framework for managing and disseminating information. Responsibility for maintenance of the web site is devolved down to individual parts of the school within this framework. Much of the information in the web site is generated dynamically from core databases.
Almost all support is provided by the computing officers within the school. The move to a common management framework and the use of automated techniques has reduced some of the pressure of this support, but aspects of the Windows Managed Desktop have introduced additional load. Procedures have been introduced to ensure that computing support requirements are identified at proposal stage and appropriate rechardge included in grant applications.
Interaction with EUCS takes place mostly through the Call Management System and with several teams including Science and Engineering Support Team, Network Services, Desktop Team, Architecture Team and the Unix Team. Access to tools such as the Automation Portal and IDMS has reduced the need to call directly on other teams but only provides some solutions in this area.
One of the guiding principles of the team is to use services provided centrally where they meet the needs of the School. This may apply even if the service doesn’t match exactly but can be locally tuned or supplemented to meet the school’s needs. Where a central service does not meet the needs, the service is provided locally. Examples of the former are:
· The use of staffmail and smsmail for mail, although local IMAP services are also provided to support mail archives which are larger than the current mail quota on staffmail. Recent problems with connection failures and timeouts on the staffmail have undermined staff confidence in the central and need to be addressed by EUCS.
· The Windows XP Managed Desktop is used extensively but with local configuration to meet school needs. The principles of centrally managed system configuration and application deployment fit well with school policy but technical aspects of the Microsoft solution are problematic and finding solutions to these involve extra work at the school level. The regular detailed dialogue with the EUCS Desktop Services Team during the weekly Thursday meetings proves very helpful in this area (see 4 below). User perception of the Managed Desktop is coloured by the time taken for machines to boot, especially when software updates take place, and by the time taken to log on. Some users have reverted to non-managed Windows XP systems to avoid these issues. The problems can be considerably worse on laptops where problems with multiple network connections can add long delays to startup times and disruption to network connections can lead to spontaneous removal of software. Synchronisation of off-line files with servers can also be unpredictable.
· Computer account management uses universal usernames and where possible authentication takes place use central services. Administering the accounts using the GUI tools provided can be very time-consuming. The lack of command-line or programmatic interfaces to the IDMS also generates extra work.
· Wireless access in Crew are bought in from EUCS
An example of services provided locally can be found in the Linux servers providing file storage and compute resources and the Linux workstations used by some users. These use Red Hat Enterprise with central management provided through the Red Hat update service. Standard packages from the Red Hat suite are used where appropriate with additional packages built from source and added to a local repository.
File storage is provided locally to cater for the large and rapidly expanding requirements in the school which could not be provided economically within the central framework. There is a need for a central archive facility for large data volumes which are infrequently or never updated. The school plans to utilise facilities with the tape library of the SAN for some backup and archive services once that facility is available, possibly by purchase of an additional tape drive unit and associated media.
The school web sites are provided by local servers running Apache and Zope. The choice of Zope was made when the formation of the school was in early stages and the need for a content management system with devolved control became clear. The ability to give editorial control to organisations and individuals has been invaluable in creating a school identity for the web-site while supporting the differing needs of many uses. The support for database access to MySQL and Oracle also allowed the web-site to take advantage of information held in school databases. There are some frustrations with the mechanism for adding pre-prepared material since the interface only allows on files to be uploaded at a time .
School databases are used to support essential administration of the school in the following areas:
· People – staff, postgraduate students, honorary staff and visitors
· Publications
· Examination and mark recording
· Finance
· Rooms
These databases are implemented in Oracle and have been developed over the last 14 years. The data are used to drive several aspects of the school web site including staff and student details, membership of groups and lists of publications. The databases are also used to populate mailing lists which are updated daily.
Some aspects of these databases mirror information held in central databases and keeping these up-to-date is a major problem. While a web-based or GUI interface to central databases may meet the requirements of an individual academic, it does not provide a solution to ensuring local copies are up to date. The local databases either provide functionality which is not available centrally or add value to central information for school purposes.
[SD2]There is little duplication of effort as far as specialist support is concerned as other schools tend not to use the specialist software which is used in GeoSciences. Use of such software by individuals outside the School will tend to use the GeoSciences team for support. EDINA is the exception since they provide their own support internally.
Information from above + some text
The plans for 2005/2006 centre on integration of IT services across the school covering:
· Consistent network and security strategy across all sites including unified domain name
· Completion of migration to XP Managed Desktop for lab, staff and postgraduate PCs
· Integration of infrastructure and core services using Linux servers providing core compute and NAS file services supplemented by Sun Solaris services for specialist applications; location transparency to support the multi-site nature of the school and resilience through multi-site replication
· Archive and backup services, using EUCS services where possible
· Implementation of EASE/Cosign authentication with ldap-based authorisation – mostly complete for Linux with database and web services outstanding
· Replace remaining Unix workstations with Linux
· DMZs for internet and intranet services with supporting database servers
· Data management services
· Improved financial management tools
· Research database
· Investigation of LCFG Lite for additional management of Linux systems
User problems reported by email, phone or in person. Calls are logged in CMS, handled by duty CMS person and dealt with or passed to most appropriate team member. Responses are monitored by escalations and by periodic revue. The transition from short-term call to medium- or long-term project requires some tuning. Problems leading to policy review are referred to IT committee.
The IT team in GeoSciences are active members of SciCOs, which provides a forum for discussion between computing officers in the College of Science and Engineering and in the Science and Engineering Support Team in EUCS. The meetings cover topics ranging from practical implementations in a school to more strategic issues such as the implications of central policy for the Schools within the College. Computing officers from several schools, including GeoSciences and several members of the Desktop Services Team within EUCS meet informally once a week on Thursday lunchtimes. The subject of the meetings alternates between issues relating to Linux/LCFG and Microsoft Windows Managed Desktop and leads to practical developments of real benefit to GeoSciences. The discussions help identify common ground between schools with shared development routes and clarify areas where differences are practices are appropriate. The value of the group would be enhanced by involvement from other schools both within and outside the College.
Members of the IT team have served in other capacities within the University, for example, as members or conveners of C&IT Working Groups and as representatives on College Computing Committee. There is currently no representation of computing officers on the re-structured College Computing and Information Technology Committee and therefore COs are divorced from the formulation of policy relating to computing at College level and above. Members of the team have also been involved in conferences and meetings locally and nationally. One member of the team is secretary of the Edinburgh Linux User Group.