Date: May 2004
The LDEO Computer Network is a distributed processing facility that has been developed at Lamont-Doherty with institutional and agency support. This facility comprises a fiber optic local-area network "backbone" which connects four major & one minor building over Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbit/sec. Nine other buildings are connected via 100Mbit FastEthernet over fiber. The backbone supports standard communication protocols (Ethernet, TCP/IP and NFS) and inter-connects the campus departments (LDEO, CIESIN & IRI) as well as the divisional computational laboratories in each of the major research units.
This network is divided into forty sub-networks which are interconnected with high speed non-blocking building switches and a central router which isolates local network traffic and improve overall performance while allowing VLANS to be created anywhere. A wireless overlay network currently covers the Seismology seminar room, Geochem seminar room, the Monell building, Oceanography, Geoscience and several outdoor areas at 802.11b (11Mbit/sec) and/or 802.11g (54Mbit/sec) speeds.
The LDEO computer network is connected to the global commodity Internet and Internet2 via a leased T3 (45Mbit/sec) telephone circuits and microwave links. Internet2 traffic routes to the Columbia Morningside computer center and on to the NN2K NYC POP which connects to vBNS, Abilene & Gemini2000 all at OC3 (155Mbit/sec)speeds. The commodity Internet traffic routes over a microwave link to the Nevis campus and on to Quest in Boston. Routers automatically redirect traffic in the event of a failure. PPP modem dialin at LDEO is supported with a digital ISDN PRI connected modem pool with 24 simultaneous connections each able to connect from 300 to 56K baud. There are one hundred twenty Sun workstations & servers in the LDEO Computer network.
The distinction between client and server has blurred over the recent past since there is more than 2TB of disk, in addition to the primary disk, distributed over the group of workstations. The workstations range from Ultra 5s to Ultra 80s and Blade 150s. The servers range from Ultra 2s to Enterprise 250s, 450s 3000 and 4500. These systems have UltraSCSI disks and FastEthernet capability along with 24 bit accelerated color graphics. A classroom setup with twelve Suns and video projector is available. These Suns can also run Microsoft applications. We also have an mass storage NFS fileserver built round a multi-processor Sun E4500 and StorageTek PowderHorn silo which is well connected to our backbone network. This system now holds about 50TB and is expandable. There are also other RAID NFS fileservers that provide network storage and fast speed.
Site wide software licenses include the latest SunOS release, C, C++, Fortran77 & 90. Net licensed software includes ARCGIS ARCVIEW, AVS, LandMark, FrameMaker, Island Draw, MatLab, Mathematica, ERMapper, Builder Xcessory, NCAR Graphics, StarOffice, IMSL and more. There is also a wealth of open source and locally developed tools. The network also supports over four hundred Apple Macintosh computers and PCs running Windows or Linux. Client software is available to provide e-mail, telnet, web browsing and ftp service along with AppleShare volumes, Samba SMB PC file sharing and backup services. There are more than seventy laser printers distributed on the various subnets.
There are a number of other computers on the LDEO network and any computer using the TCP/IP protocol suite can connect. Several Linux clusters with high speed interconnect perform parallel processing tasks as well as large long-running jobs through job scheduling software. The IRI group maintains a sixty-four processor SGI, DEC Alpha cluster and NEC SX4. CIESIN has more than thirty Suns from desktops to Enterprise 4500s. The Ewing has two Sun E3000s and several SunRays along with other Macs and PCs to support data collection and computing. All of the above groups augment there main computers with numerous Macs and PCs.
The LDEO campus has three public video teleconferencing rooms available. The Seismology seminar room has both teleconferencing and LCD projector. Monell 209 has teleconferencing with two large screen TVs and the Monell auditorium has both built in teleconferencing and projection. The Monell teleconferencing unit has four ISDN lines (512Kbps) and the other two rooms have three ISDN lines (384Kbps) and also can transmit video over the Internet.
Two HP color plotters provides 60 & 54 inch wide arbitrary length color hardcopy at 600 dots per inch. The software accepts images from a variety of sources including desktop Macs and PCs. PostScript color hardcopy is also available on various color laser printers. There are also Jet printers available for making transparencies. PostScript color 35mm slides can be produced on a Unix workstation, Mac or PC and transferred to a PCR filmwriter at a resolution of 4096 square. There are a variety of tape drives available including, 9840, 4380, 3490E, DLT, DAT, Exabyte and 6250/1600 bpi tape drives.
