NCSA for Faculty, Postdocs and Students

Authors: Amanda Thibault, Gabrielle Allen

This page aims to collect together basic information about NCSA particularly for faculty affiliates, postdocs and students. Note it is a work in progress, and we would like to keep it as succinct and up-to-date as possible, so let us know if you have additional questions, something isn't clear, or looks wrong. 

Questions still to answer:

NCSA Organization

Directors Office

Projects Coordinated Through Directors Office

Directorates

 

Administrative Support Personnel

Director's Office

Office Managers

Administrative Services

Below are listed some of the core administrative services at NCSA provided in the different departments. Depending on what you need, you should feel free to check with Laura Owen or Amanda Thibault for advice on what help is available and where to get it. Note that expensive or time consuming activities may require funds and/or negotiation of availability etc.

Getting Started at the NCSA

  1. If you have not already, please go and visit Gabrielle Allen (Rm 4034) and/or Amanda Thibault (Rm 4029) on the fourth floor of NCSA so that we can discuss how to get started at NCSA in person, and in particular discuss any space needs or items not described below. We will happily tell you people that you might want to get to know in the building, or give you a tour.
  2. Obtain your NCSA Kerberos username and password from Research Coordinator (Amanda Thibault, alombar@illinois.edu.). 
  3. Unless otherwise discussed, faculty affiliates will by default be assigned shared cubicle space on the fourth floor of NCSA in office 4103. This large office is currently shared with staff from the NCSA business office. We will assign a number of faculty to each desk so that you have somewhere to work and leave items at NCSA in the shelf-space above each desk. 
  4. Currently you will be given an NCSA email address (almost certainly with the same username as your illinois address) e.g. <username>@ncsa.illinois.edu — email to this address which includes some important mail lists used by NCSA, will all be forwarded typically to your regular Illinois address. Without trying to rationalize why this is done, you should be aware that we've found some problems with either the forwarding not being set up, or if people already had accounts from way-back (e.g. as a TeraGrid user when at a different place) the wrong address is being used. We hope to fix this very soon, but for now, please send a mail to yourself at your NCSA address, and check that you receive it. If you do not, please tell Amanda Thibault <alombar@illinois.edu>.
  5. Review and sign-off on the NCSA Security Document using your login and Kerberos password. This document will be sent to you via email after your start date (see “NCSA Security Strategy” below.)
  6. If you would like to have your students or postdocs working in the building as part of your NCSA-related work, please start by contacting Amanda Thibault.
  7. Add a photo and personalize information on your NCSA electronic directory profile at https://internal.ncsa.illinois.edu/mis/directory/. Go to “My Profile” on the left menu and be sure to fill in information on both the “Staff Directory Listing” and “Additional Information” tabs located at the top. To save changes, click “Publish” at bottom of the page.
  8. Report anticipated office hours to Theme Lead and Research Coordinator.
  9. Make friends with the front line IT support, Alex Farthing and Bruce Mather in Rm 4042, ask them to set up your laptop so you can print at NCSA.
  10. Check that your ID swipe card works by running it through the reader at the NCSA front door and seeing that the led turns green (recommend that you try this during work hours before an urgent trip to NCSA out of hours).
  11. Note that each floor of NCSA has a kitchen with a shared fridge/freezer and microwave. The ground floor has some vending machines up by the class rooms. 

More About Some Basic NCSA Services

Basic IT Services

Snail Mail

Meetings and Workshop Planning

To reserve space for a meeting, contact your group’s office manager. If your group is not listed or you are not sure who to contact, please contact Laura Owen (lowen@illinois.edu) for assistance.

Reservable Meeting Room Spaces for Small Meetings

These rooms typically have a projectors, white board and a conference telephone. 

Reservable Meeting Room Spaces for Larger Meetings

Workshops, Conferences and Events

NCSA has superb event facilities on the ground floor, with an auditorium (Rm 1122) with seats 195, two training rooms, large executive conference room (Rm 1104), and an atrium equipped for receptions. Event services include projection, microphones, webcast and video capture, videoconferencing etc. If you are interested in hosting a workshop or conference that aligns with the NCSA mission, please contact Amanda Thibault or talk with your theme lead. Assuming the theme lead supports the activity and has sufficient funds available the use of NCSA facilities on the ground floor of NCSA can be made available at no charge. Please note that it is currently not easy to support meetings at weekends or holidays, or late evenings, so please discuss your ideas and plans as soon as possible to find out what might be possible. The webpage http://events.ncsa.illinois.edu, has pages describing the facilities, services, and underlying costs, but it requires a VPN if off campus and an NCSA email address. 

Mail Lists

Faculty are given an email address through NCSA that is automatically forwarded to your regular campus email. If you are not receiving NCSA emails, including the weekly NCSA newsletter “Bytes and Pieces”, please contact Amanda Thibault.

NCSA’s Security Strategy

This document provides staff with tools and education concerning security policy and procedures. Relying on individuals to use these tools to implement security appropriate to their work, NCSA supports a variety of computing systems, services and research projects for a nationwide group of academic and industrial users. It is the responsibility of every employee to protect its assets and those of its staff and clients.

You can go to the following site or an email reminder will be sent to you within your first week of hire to electronically validate the NCSA’s security document located at https://internal.ncsa.uiuc.edu.mis/securitydoc/.

Building Access 

 

Anyone with a 0% NCSA appointment, or who is a sponsored guest with building access, should automatically be able to access the NCSA building via their university ID card outside of business hours. If you or your students are in an office with swipe card access you should also have access anytime to these rooms. (Please check this!). Any office keys you need will be provided by NCSA facilities — as usual we need to get the keys back when you leave, and for that reason you will find that we prefer to try and use swipe card access for rooms for students, visitors etc.

 

Cyberinfrastructure Resources

Useful Stuff

Bear in mind, that we have a lot of things around the center that have been purchased by different people – Occulus rifts, 4K screens, high definition video cameras, large printers, etc. If you want to know who might have something you should ask around (e.g. ask Doug Fein, Bob Patterson, ...) 

Illinois Campus Cluster Nodes

NCSA is an investor in the Illinois Campus Cluster Program and currently holds sixteen nodes and three ten packs of disks. Specifically, the purchase was for:

These resources are available for appropriate NCSA staff and faculty use. To gain access you must first apply for an Illinois Campus Cluster Login at: https://campuscluster.illinois.edu/invest/user_form.html. Select “NCSA” as the primary queue. You will then be notified when your login has been created.

Gabrielle Allen (gallen@ncsa.illinois.edu) is the investor representative and Tim Boerner (tboerner@illinois.edu) is the operations manager.

The Illinois Campus Cluster Program webpage https://campuscluster.illinois.edu/ offers additional information for all experience levels. If you have any additional questions please contact the help desk at help@campuscluster.illinois.edu.

Innovative Systems Laboratory

NCSA’s Innovative Systems Laboratory (ISL) conducts research and development around mid- and long-term needs in core computing technology areas. ISL’s focus is on new systems or impact on existing systems using emerging processing, storage and interconnect technologies and novel computing environments. ISL provides support for evaluating and developing new technologies of interest to NCSA programs and projects and NCSA academic and industrial partners.

Resources include:

For more information or to collaborate, please contact Volodymyr Kindratenko (kindr@ncsa.illinois.edu) or visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/about/org/isl. 

Blue Waters

The NSF funded Blue Waters petascale supercomputer has a peak performance of over 13 petaflops, some 26 petabytes of disk storage, and up to 380 petabytes of tape storage. Although much of Blue Waters is allocated through an NSF review process, different mechanisms exists for Illinois faculty and researchers to take advantage of this resource. The different allocation mechanisms are described at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/illinois-allocations. Contact Jay Roloff for more information on Blue Waters allocations.

Ice House Long Term Data Storage

The NCSA Ice House facility provides reliable long-term storage for backups, archives, data needing mid to long term storage with only occasional access. The storage uses a disk cache to enhance data transfer performance and a tape library backend for reliable long term storage. Data can be deposited as a private archive or made available for others to download via Globus Data Sharing. Use cases suitable for this type of storage include research data that needs to be stored for future analysis, data that supports publications, backups or as a data replication site for existing services. Multiple classes of service are available on a consulting basis. WHO IS THE CONTACT FOR THIS?

Storage Condo 

The NCSA storage condo provides mid-level scalable storage from 10 terabytes to over a petabyte. The cost-recovery fee-for-service model starts at around $100/terabyte/year. Each project gets a private file system/s, access to data is via file system (NFS) or Globus. Additional services and access options are available via additional consulting fees. Use cases for this type of storage are hosting of large data sets, operational data storage and scratch space for analysis, mid-term data storage for archival needs. WHO IS THE CONTACT FOR THIS?

Communication and Social Media

To keep up to date with NCSA you should read the weekly Bytes and Pieces newsletter which is sent by email to the all-ncsa mail list, usually late in the day on Wednesday. Anyone without an NCSA affiliation can subscribe to a weekly news and events mail list which is the same news without the more internal items — see the NCSA Get Updates page at  http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/get_updates for how to subscribe. This page also links to our feeds on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

Media Lab 

Information forthcoming

Research and Education Programs

The research and education directorate at NCSA coordinates the following programs and activities at NCSA. To find out any more about these programs please ask Amanda Thibault. 


Around NCSA

 

Snail mail room  Kitchen