Dear TSD users, in the final hour before vacation time we would like to share some information about some new, and some soon to come, features in TSD.
PCoIP
We guess many of you find the current login to windows machines cumbersome. We do now have the far simpler, and better, PCoIP protocol in production in project p11,p12,p19,p21,p22,p25,p26,p28 and p36. During early August it will be available for all projects in TSD. This protocol supports video and sound much better than RDP, and it even supports copy from the client clipboard to paste on the TSD server (NB at the time only 5000 characters.) And the login is very very easy, and works from mac and windows. Linux still lags a bit behind here.
Brukerinfo https://brukerinfo.tsd.usit.no
We in TSD issue quite nice passwords for you, if you have photographic memory :). From now on you can log in to https://brukerinfo.tsd.usit.no, from within TSD, and change your password there. This is a quite neat feature for those of you being member in at least one project and then adding on a new one. The one-time code will remain the same, and once you change password in the old project you will gain access using the same password in the new project. The feature of administrating group memberships in brukerinfo will be useful for the projects that want granular access control inside the different folders under /data/ or elsewhere. This will be in production early fall. If you have pressing needs, contact us and we can fix it for you (tsd-drift@usit.uio.no).
Thinlinc
For those of you thinking windows login has been hard, linux has been worse and less stable. Approximately by the end of August we will launch Thinlinc access to linux servers in TSD. This will enable you to, on any machine with a good html5 browser (firefox, opera, chrome), enter something like thinlinc.tsd.usit.no and you login with username, passord and one-time code. You then end up in your linux machine. In this new setup we might switch from having one linux machine pr user to a more limited number of linux servers pr project, as thinlinc supports several users on one computer.
File lock
The file lock has become very stable and a bit faster during the last half year after we removed some bugs. Auto-deletion and error-reporting is on our ToDo list. We strongly recommend you to zip or tar files before up /download as this makes the process run faster. Our problem is that we neveer know how big a file really is, so we have to wait a bit after each file to listen for changes, thus many files takes long time.
CPU cost on Colossus (hpc) for UiO projects
We have given this a close look and managed to set up a pool of approximately 5 M CPU hours that is for free for UiO projects in TSD. So all UiO projects will get a qouta by default when they sign up for using Colossus, and they will not be charged for any CPU runtime cost before the entire 5 M CPU hours has been spent, and the projects been informed.
Huge Mem nodes in Colossus
The huge-mem nodes in Colossus came into production (again) this spring
App development
At USIT we are now playing with ? appification ? of nettskjema so that researchers can move from gathering sensitive data in web-browsers to using iOS Apps combined with getting data from HealthKit. We hope to get something in pilot production during the fall. Please contact us if interested (tsd-drift@usit.uio.no)
R packages
All Cran and Bioconductor R packages has been mirrored to the inside of TSD for your convenience, please read here about package installation and getting dependencies in place when working with local repo.
Disk usage overview
Disk usage overview for your project can be found under /data/durable/projectinfo/ and is updated every day. Use wordpad to open in windows, linux use ? more ? or similar.
Read more :
TSD status
At the time of writing we have about 100 research projects inside TSD, and approximately 1 PiB of data on disk. During the last Notur period (1/10-14 -1/4-15) Colossus delivered about 2M CPU hours to researchers.
Summer 2015
TSD is more or less manned throughout the summer, but you will se longer response times and for some technical issues we will have to await the right personell to come back from vacation. As the system seems very stable (no major issues since Easter, we thing the summer can be enjoyed both outside and inside TSD.