Roles

Projects

Render Farm

Continuing from last semester, the render farm project is much more stable. It was presented to the Digital Arts & Sciences program on Wednesday, 4 March 2009. The render farm project has since absorbed machines once used for the St. Lawrence County BOCES SafeSchools project, providin a total of 18 rendering nodes (plus the server). Plans for next semester include taking our most powerful node (dual-core Xeon, 4 GB RAM, 1.5 TB hard drive space) and prototyping the next generation of the render farm with this machine as our rendering master (as well as a slave) and storage server.

Mirror

With the new hardware for mirror ready for an operating system, I went ahead and installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 in order to utilize the ZFS filesystem. After trying to configure the OpenSolaris operating system, it was decided that it was too complex and foreign for someone to easily manage this server in the future. With the release of CentOS 5.3, Matt McCarrell and I decided it would be best to switch back to using Linux. With its current configuration, mirror has one Intel Core2Duo processor, 8 GB RAM, and 5 TB of usable hard drive space (there are six 1 TB hard drives, but this solution provides some redundancy).

Matt also approached Josh Fiske about the bandwidth cap on mirror, and since we sync mostly with other mirrors over the university's Internet2 connection, the bandwidth cap has been raised to 25mbit, to fully utilize the I2 if available. We are currently mirroring CentOS and Ubuntu ISOs, and the Ubuntu packages themselves are syncing currently.

Websites

I wrote a new, simpler website for COSI and will be working on re-writing it and adding content as needed. Other CS labs sites will be updated as needed.