Distributed systems advances

The Distributed Systems Group (DSG) provides the necessary infrastructure for the NCAR community to conduct daily computational activities. For instance, DSG provides the NCAR electronic mail service and supports both Internet and Intranet World Wide Web (WWW) servers, as well as Domain Name Service (DNS) for NCAR. Most of these services are provided transparently to NCAR users. Additionally, DSG supports interactive servers on which to conduct daily activities (e.g., e-mail, text editing, MSS access), gateway servers that process 50% of supercomputer job submittals and MSS activity, library access and queries, and computational service (e.g., SGI XL Challenge).

DSG's focus for FY97 was on consolidating services onto fewer servers, upgrading servers to the vendors' latest operating system levels, integrating high availability hardware and software on servers, use of productivity tools, upgrading older servers to newer hardware configurations, using industry standard software such as Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) to eventually replace legacy systems, e.g. Mainframe And Server Network (MASnet) and MASnet/Internet in a production mode, phasing out obsolete servers and workstations, taking the leadership role in server security measures, and integrating network technologies such as Fibre Channel (FC) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) into DSG servers.

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