End-of-life systems
In compliance with a recommendation from the most recent five-year review by
NSF, SCD established in FY1997 the End-of-Life Systems (EOLS) project to
develop definitions and procedures for reviewing all existing supported
hardware and software systems in SCD to determine whether support of each
system is still justified. Determinations are made as to whether a system is
still needed and/or should be retired or replaced. Criteria are primarily
economic. For example, is the value of a system worth its support costs
and/or can the old system be replaced with one that is more valuable and/or
less expensive to support?
Periodic EOLS review is necessary because it is often otherwise difficult to
withdraw support allocated to old systems and reassign this support to
future endeavors. It can therefore be difficult to find resources to support
future systems. EOLS review helps to break such a deadlock, and facilitates
movement toward the future.
FY1998 retirements
As part of an ongoing effort to improve SCD productivity and efficiency and
to focus the resources of the division on those activities that deliver the
most useful products and services to the UCAR community, SCD continuously
evaluates the utility and viability of the hardware and software systems it
maintains and the services it renders. As new technologies emerge, they often
supercede previous ones adopted for use in the NCAR computational, storage,
and communications environments. SCD's ability to adopt and support those
new technologies often depends not only on its resources, but on its ability
to retire older systems and services. Charles Dickens of Stanford University
appropriately stated: "The ability to advance the leading edge of technology
is constrained by the ability to prune the trailing edge."
The following systems were retired from service during FY1998:
- The Cray T3D/128 (at the close of FY1998)
- Operating systems for the Cray Research and Silicon Graphics
supercomputers that were not Year-2000 compliant
- Sun IPC, ELC, and SPARC 1 desktop systems used within SCD
- IBM RS6000 desktop systems used within SCD
- Sun 4/690 servers used in SCD
- The SunOS 4.1.x operating system
- All vestiges of the SCD MASnet system, with the exception of the Mass
Storage System's Import/Export utilities (The MSS Import/Export system's
dependence on MASnet will be replaced early in FY1999.)
- This list is still incomplete: Other equipment
retired this year by SCD (eg: NETS-supported equipment) should also
be referenced here!