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Advanced Desktop Computing in Physics Doctoral Training - Q2 1999 Status Report
We have brought the system to the state that it is now a very active place. Student research projects as well as routine uses such as e-mail and web browsing have demonstrated the attractiveness of the renovation conducted under the Intel grant. A well-attended open house introduced professors who are teaching graduate courses this fall as well as the general physics graduate student community to the facility. During the open house numerous demonstrations including CPU-intensive simulations for teaching were presented. The capabilities of both the Windows NT and Unix environments were displayed. The open house served as a shake down cruise for many aspects of the facility that will be critical in the fall when a primary target group of users, the entering class of physics graduate students arrives.
In response to comments from professors and students, especially at the open house, we will be installing new software such as particular mathematical subroutine libraries (i.e. ``Numerical Recipes'') and software packages such as ``MatLab''. We expect to set up a web server. This may prove especially useful for the distribution of course software to students. We also expect to assist students who wish to gain xwindow access to the facility from home personal computers in setting up their connections.
Ron Maimon, Linux System Administrator, Physics Department Stephen Rinehart, Graduate Student/Linux System Consultant, Physics Department Basudev Chaudhuri, Graduate Student/Windows NT System Administrator, Physics Department Ralph B. Robinson, Programmer Analyst, Physics Department Carl Franck, Associate Professor, Faculty Advisor, Physics Department
Mr. Ralph B. Robinson and Mr. Stephen Rinehart of the Cornell Physics Department have set up our entire complement of computers: eight single processor workstations (six 300 Mhz P2 machines by Dell and two 266 MHz P2 machines from Intel). All the workstations are connected at 100Mb using an Intel 510T switch. We have also provided an HP LaserJet 4000 TN printer for the network. We have installed Partition Magic from PowerQuest corporation; this program provides the boot manager when enables dual boot capability for the workstations. We currently have one computer acting as an NT server, and one machine acting as a Linux NFS server. Standard operation of the room will see half of the machines running NT and the other half running Linux (RedHat 5.0). Should a situation arise where more machines are needed in one operating system, the dual boot capability provides the option of switching up six out of the eight machines to either NT or Linux on short notice. Our target users are students in and instructors of graduate physics courses (for computational problems), graduate students prior to their selection of a thesis research group for their own scientific computing, and graduate teaching assistants for computer support of their teaching. We anticipate that novel applications such as the analysis of sophisticated graduate instructional laboratory data will naturally occur in our facility. We had two difficulties in setting up the facility. Six of the machines were SCSI systems provided by Dell. The configuration of the SCSI controller, unfortunately, only allows two of the three connectors (there are an internal wide SCSI, internal narrow SCSI, and external wide SCSI connector) to be used simultaneously. Since the machines were shipped with a SCSI hard drive, using the internal wide connector, and a SCSI CD-ROM, using the internal narrow connector, the external wide port was non-functional. A solution was found after some effort. The second difficulty was in "cloning" the Dell machines. For simplicity, uniformity, and ease of operation, we completely configured one machine in the desired configuration. Once this was completed, we attempted to use Drive Image Pro (from PowerQuest) to clone the machine, making all eight of our machines identical. Unfortunately, for reasons which were never fully resolved, we found that Drive Image Pro could not make an image of the entire dual-boot internal drive. We were able to successfully clone the machine after experimentally determining that we could clone the Linux and NT partitions individually. To elaborate on our experience with the SCSI systems, several additional points can be made: We only cloned the Dell systems. The other two Intel systems were different, and only one had SCSI. We wished to clone by using an external drive. We found cloning to an Iomega Jaz 1GB drive to be too slow and unreliable to be practical. We gave up after several attempts. We then used one of the external 9GB SCSI drives provided via our cash grant. Creating a single image file did not work for three reasons: Drive Image Pro must be run under DOS and DOS limits partitions to 2GB. Drive Image Pro cannot compress Linux partitions which amounted to ~1GB. The amount of data in the NT partitions that could be compressed, could not be compressed enough to fit in the remaining ~1GB in a 2GB partition. A second method called disk-to-disk, in Drive Image Pro could be used to copy partitions from the system drive to the external drive. However, the NTFS format system drive for NT would not transfer without numerous errors. Eventually, we cloned systems in three steps. First we used Partition Magic booting from a floppy and running from a CD to create the correct size and type of partitions on the internal drive. Second we transferred all the partitions save the NTFS system partition via the disk-to-disk method from the external disk. Third, we restored the NTFS partition from an image file containing only that partition. (Fourth, we fixed errors in the NT drive letter assignments. Fifth, we booted the Linux rescue floppys and reran the Linux Loader utility, lilo, to allow Linux to boot.) |
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Last modified on: 10/12/99 |
