ITC Research News Highlights
August, 1999

* We are very excited to announce that ITC is opening a Research Computing
Support Center this fall!  The Research Computing Support Center (RCSC)
will be located in Wilson Hall, in Room 244, around the corner from the
ITC Help Desk.  It will be staffed by a mixture of staff from the ITC
Research Computing Group and and advanced graduate student consultants.
The grand opening is slated for Fall Break.  The Center will provide
walk-in and telephone support for research and statistical computing
questions.  It will be equipped with Unix workstations, WinTel computers
and a Macintosh to provide the right platform for researchers to
demonstrate problems, test programs, etc.  Additional information and
details will be posted at the ITC Research Computing Web site:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research

* January 1, 2000 is fast approaching, is your research lab ready?
Wondering how to start; what equipment needs to be checked? Visit UVa's
Year2000 website at: http://www.virginia.edu/~year2000/home.html There
is a page specifically for the research community at:
http://www.virginia.edu/~year2000/y2researcher.html that details steps
for assessing your research area, contact information for federal
granting agencies, compliance of equipment and instruments, and other
tools and resources.
     ITC also provides information about the Year2000 compliance of
selected software supported or provided by ITC that is of particular
relevance to researchers. The URL is:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/docs/y2k.research.html
    If you're a medical researcher, you'll want to visit the Food and
Drug Administration's Y2K website at:
http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/yr2000/year2000.html It provides a searchable
database of medical instructments and equipment with what, if any,
Year2000 compliance information is available from the manufacturer.

* ITC's High Performance IBM SP computer's hardware and software were
upgraded and expanded over the past spring and summer.  It now provides
24 total nodes, 8 of which are dedicated to parallel computing. For
details, visit:  http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/docs/SP2.html 
and click on the links under the heading "SP Upgrade Announcements"

* We will be rolling out early this fall a replacement for the obsolete,
and often cantankerous, data archive known as "maggie".  Through IBM's
Shared University Research (SUR) program, ITC obtained an IBM 3494 tape
robot, with an initial capacity of 6 terabytes running the ADSTAR
Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM).  The migration of files from maggie
to the new Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system is already under
way.  Contact ITC's Research Computing Support group manager, Tim
Tolson, at TTolson@Virginia.EDU for further information.
 
* The ITC Research Computing Support group offers several introductory
computer workshops on research and statistical computing software.  The
workshops are being scheduled now for the beginning of the fall
semester. The courses, dates and times will be posted on our website in
the next few weeks.

For Prue Thorner, for Office of the VP for Research and Public Service,
for their Fall issue of Research News
8/10/99  Tim F.J. Tolson