Computing Infrastructure

The Air Quality Center which is located within the Voinovich Center has environmentally controlled and restricted access server labs with a constant power supply and 24/7 technical coverage.

The computing platform dedicated to air quality modeling is composed of a PSSC Xeon PowerWulf system with a Linux cluster of eight dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz processors and a 64-bit AMD Operon dual 3.0 Ghz unix workstation. In addition, the computing platform includes four stand-alone workstations each of which has an Intel 2.4 Ghz processor, with 500GB to 1TB of allocated memory. The Linux cluster and workstations are connected to 6TB HP MSA1500 and PSSC 1.5 TB RAID5 storage systems through fiber channel adapters for data storage and backup. The HP MSA1500 can be extended up to 43 TB. The linux cluster head node includes a Sony AIT-1 360 GB internal autoloader tape back up unit to hold four media cartridges and each cartridge can provide 50GB data storage space. BRU tape back up software for the Sony AIT unit was installed on the head node for automatic and runtime backup.

Ohio University is directly connected to the Ohio Academic Resource Network (OARnet), which is one of the largest internet providers in the country. Ohio University’s Communication Network Services (CNS) provides technical/hardware/internet support.

The Voinovich Center also provides GIS and database support. The center has three computer labs: the Environmental and Community GIS lab, the Redistricting Lab, and the Data Center Lab. Each lab houses a number of Windows XP computers along with two Windows NT servers, five Windows NT workstations, and three Dec ALPHA Digital Unix servers. A variety of GIS packages (Arc/Info, Arcview, and Mapinfo) are available. The Voinovich center maintains a full set of Census/TIGER GIS files (1:100,000 scale) and data from the U.S. Geological Survey (1:24,000 scale).