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College of Engineering - Faculty Orientation

Engineering IT ● enghelp@bu.edu ● 617-353-5303 ● http://www.bu.edu/engit ● 48 Cummington Street, B01

Computing Services and Resources

Accounts New employees will have a BU login account created automatically, but new College users must run ENG WebNew to access the College's Active Directory (AD) resources (e.g. file storage, email, room access). An Engineering IT staff member must pre-approve all new faculty and staff webnew accounts, so please contact our office as soon as possible to facilitate account creation. Many other accounts types are available. For more information, see the links below:

• http://www.bu.edu/engit/support/accounts/

• http://www.bu.edu/tech/accounts/

Email Once new faculty and staff members have run ENG Webnew their Exchange email account will be created automatically. These email accounts are supported on Outlook and Entourage, however, they may also be hooked into Thunderbird and Mac Mail. There is also a web front end that can be accessed through any internet browser, http://xmail.bu.edu.

Network Most offices and labs have one ethernet port active per four-port wall panel, and computers set to DHCP ("automatically get an IP address") will simply plug in and work. Wireless networking is available as well. To activate more ports or to request a static IP address, or for info on how to use the wireless access points, please see http://www.bu.edu/tech/infrastructure/networks . Please note that private routers are not permitted on the BU network. Custom networking deployments can be requested from Nethelp via that same web page.

File Storage The College has a clustered NetApp storage area network (SAN) providing file storage for courses, research, administration, and personal data. Every ENG affiliated person receives 10GB of personal space (X drive or home directory). In addition, courses may use this space to store course-related materials and researchers may request space. ENGIT will work with researcher groups to provide as much of our free, fast, reliable, backed-up storage to them as possible with the option of purchasing additional, private storage which can be attached to the NetApp. The NetApp storage can be accessed from Linux, Macs and Windows machines. Further information can be found at the link below:

• http://collaborate.bu.edu/ece/DataStorage

Quick-Start Instructions for New Research Labs

High Performance Computing Several services are available for high-performance computation. Faculty considering purchasing their own HPC equipment may find that these IT-supported resources may meet their needs, or if not, they are encouraged to "buy-in" and join their own equipment to the Engineering Grid to take advantage of both their own and the publicly available resources simultaneously.

• The Engineering Grid consists of approximately 500 processor cores and 32 high-end GPUs, and it continues to grow. All nodes are currently running BU Linux (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but the scheduler (Grid Engine) has the ability to support other operating systems as well. Software available includes all GPL software available in the BU/CentOS Linux distributions, licensed mathematics and statistics software installed on AFS, as well as additional software installed on the College of Engineering Network Appliance. The ENG-Grid is organized into various public and private queues across campus, and is integrated with users' normal AD/Kerberos usernames and file space. Public resources are available for immediate use by all. Please see these instructions to start using the Grid or these instructions to join your own resources to it.

• The Scientific Computing and Visualization Center within IS&T runs additional compute clusters which require separate accounts. See http://scv.bu.edu to apply.

• For massively-parallel jobs spanning thousands or tens of thousands of nodes, ENG and SCV can help facilitate applications for larger-scale resources such as XSEDE.

Room Access Members of the College can access many rooms with their BU ID card by swiping card readers outside the rooms. To request access to a room, use the Zaius system.

Websites Website hosting is provided by IS&T, while ENGIT designs and develops websites and web applications.

• Requesting a Website

Wikis BU Information Services & Technology (IS&T) provides wiki's running MediaWiki.

• Requesting a Wiki from IS&T

Purchasing Please contact ENGIT if you require guidance or assistance in purchasing a desktop computer, printer, peripheral or equipment for your research group. To view the preferred vendors for Boston University, please visit the BU Sourcing website at: http://www.bu.edu/sourcing

Server Deployment If your research requires a server or service of any kind please contact ENGIT to discuss what specific servers ENG already has running for college use. In many cases, the services a research group requires can be satisfied by an existing college-wide or university-wide service.

Backups The BU IS&T Operations group will backup critical servers. However, if you require data to be backed up the most efficient solution would be to store the data on the College’s file storage system which is already backed up. IS&T is currently developing a backup infrastructure a for essential laptops based on Crashplan (http://www.crashplan.com/).

Office & Mobile Phones Telecommunications is managed centrally by IS&T. Faculty and staff should request long distance phone codes by filling out the request form at: http://www.bu.edu/tech/comm/phone/calling-services/longdistance/ which requires your Department Director’s approval. Cell phone purchases can be made through the Telecommunications Office as well. For additional information on purchasing a mobile phone and configuring it please visit the following websites:

• Setting up and using your Phone

• Purchasing mobile phones

Software

University Software

IT Help Center – Departmental Sales:

Through the IT Help Center licensed software, including Microsoft and Adobe, can be purchased at substantial savings. These items may be purchased with an approved requisition. For a complete list of software please visit: http://www.bu.edu/tech/desktop/purchase/departmental/

BU Site-Licensed Software:

Here (http://www.bu.edu/tech/desktop/site-licensed-software/) you will find access to a variety of free software and shareware, as well as commercial software licensed to all or part of the University. Please visit the site for complete usage details as some licensing considerations may need to be taken. The software at this site includes, but is not limited to:

Additionally, BU has some mathematical and scientific software site-licensed: www.bu.edu/tech/desktop/site-licensed-software/mathsci/. Many packages are are offered through the AFS server on campus (OIT application server). Some of the software packages offered through AFS to BU Linux machines are:

College Software

The software listed below is available to anyone in the College without the purchase of a license. Most other software including but not limited to Microsoft and Adobe software packages need to be purchased through University Computers (see above). Please contact ENGIT at enghelp@bu.edu to get additional information on installation options.

Departmental Software

Within each department and for various labs additional software has been purchased. Please contact ENG IT for any questions regarding departmental and lab software.