SICminar on VPN, 27 January 2010
This Wednesday, at 12.30 in the Aula, Diego Serra (SIC) will be giving a
SICminar about the VPN at the IAC. It will be a hands-on talk, so bring your
own laptop (with Java and Thunderbird installed) to learn and try yourself
all about what the VPN can do. Diego will go through all the menus and options,
describe the "Network Connect", show us how to configure the email
reader to access the IAC email server through the VPN, and how to use the "meeting" facility.
Last, he will talk about how to run licensed software packages (IDL, Mathematica,
etc.) via VPN. Whether you are a seasoned VPN user or don't even know what
VPN stands for, this is a seminar you cannot afford to miss!
New year's resolution: I'll do backups, I'll do backups...
Do you make regular and efficient backups of all your important data? OK,
no need to blush. Just make sure you put aside one hour of your time to learn
how to use
rdiff-backup,
so that you can have regular incremental backups. Using rdiff-backup is
really
easy, and it will allow you to recover the last (or a previous) version
of any of the files you care about. If there is enough interest (let us know
by e-mail), we could run a
SIEminar about it.
Visualization software in parallel, anyone?
As part of a student project, we built a small visualization cluster (4 nodes,
16 CPUs). The visualization software used was
ParaView,
and since its documentation didn't seem to have a step-by-step guide on how
to do it, we put together a
SIEpedia article
on
how
to build it. If your visualization needs are big, get in touch with us
to study whether a similar solution could be suitable for you.
Supercomputing hall of fames (second semester 2009)
As it is becoming our habit, we have published the usage statistics of the
Supercomputing
resources at the IAC for the second semester of 2009. In total,
1084413.57 CPU
hours were delivered during this period (roughly "equivalent" to
123.79 years in just one CPU). By resource, Condor delivered 610246.2 CPU
hours, LaPalma 336363.90 and Chimera 137803.47. Full details of the breakdown
by users can be found at the
SIE
Forum for
Condor,
LaPalma
and
Chimera.
If you want a piece of this pie and don't know how to start, just let us
know.
If you are leaving the IAC don't forget to bring along your e-mails...
Some users have asked how they can migrate all their existing mail at
the IAC servers to another provider (i.e. Gmail) when leaving the IAC. This
is actually quite easy and it just involves setting up two IMAP accounts
in your mail reader: one for the IAC server and another one for Gmail. Once
this is done, you just have to select the messages you want to transfer and
move them to the other account (dates, etc. will be kept, though not the
folder structure). If you have many folders this can be quite tiresome, so
we would recommend using (just for the purpose of migrating, later you can
go to your usual software) a mail reader that gives you a "view" of
ALL your messages (for instance Opera Mail), in which case you can see all
your messages in one virtual folder and move them all to Gmail without any
effort.
Second Practical Course of the Spanish Virtual Observatory
- Reminder!
We remind all that the "Second Practical Course of the Spanish Virtual
Observatory", a workshop on using Virtual Observatory tools, will take
place here at the IAC on 4-5 March 2010. Full details can be found at the
Segundo
Curso Práctico de la Red Temática SVO page. If you wish
to register, hurry up: the deadline is Friday 19 February 2010.