24-Dec-2019

2019: The Year in Review

2019 was another busy, transformative year for CLASSE and for CLASSE-IT. We devoted significant resources to CHESS and CBETA commissioning and operations, but we also met two noteworthy milestones: rolling out a new Timesheet App for effort tracking, and completing the Linux operating system transition from Scientific Linux 6 to 7. We also upgraded the CLASSE Compute Farm with new queueing software, and we refreshed the main network connections for Newman Lab and the Annex.

Currently, we are in the midst of migrating our 250+ Windows computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10. We plan to complete this time-consuming project in the next month or two, along with a much-awaited Autodesk upgrade.

Here are a few statistics of our day-to-day activity for the past year:

• 3,100 new ServiceRequest tickets submitted by 250 different users, generating over 17,000 emails
• 2.6 million jobs submitted to the CLASSE Compute Farm
• 230,000 pages sent to our printers

In addition, we:

• Deployed or upgraded over 140 desktops, laptops, servers, and experimental control system computers
• Provided A/V support for over 40 seminars, meetings, conferences, workshops, and other events

Finally, as part of CHESS-U commissioning, we:

• Ran 6 miles of copper network cable
• Ran 1000 feet of fiber optic cable with 400 individual splices
• Deployed over 60 network switches
• Built a completely new control system and EPICS archive cluster
• Added more than 1 petabyte to the CHESS-DAQ data storage/backup system

Whether it's maintaining steady user operations or introducing new technological capabilities, the CLASSE-IT team is grateful to be a part of all the research at the lab. Thanks to everyone at CLASSE for an exciting 2019. Happy holidays! See you in 2020!

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE-IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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