With research being such an integral part of what we do here at Auburn, OIT devotes a great deal of effort to creating research resources. We work to keep networks up to speed for international collborations as well as local efforts all across campus. We make various software packages available through virtualization and provide access to them with computer labs. And for larger-scale research, our supercomputers make quick work of complex data that would take a single computer at least 10 times longer to parse through.
For the High Performance Computing (HPC) group, 2019 saw the decommissioning of Auburn's very first supercomputer, CASIC. Launched in 2013, it served campus well, and is now being rebuilt as a test environment for future HPC progress.
One such progression is the new supercomputer cluster that Auburn hopes to launch late 2020 to supplement the work being processed by the nearly 5-year-old system, Hopper. Since its installation in 2016, Hopper has grown to have nearly 6000 processors, and even still, the computer ran at approximately 72% utilization rate throughout 2019.
In addition to several major system changes, 2019 also provided the HPC group with their first opportunity to be featured in Auburn's Research Magazine. The article, entitled The New Superheroes of Supercomputers shares more details of the history of the HPC group and the forthcoming third supercomputer. As Auburn's place in the research arena grows, we expect the use of the HPC systems will as well.
With so much research and collaboration taking place online, it's crucial to have consistent connectivity. A major 2019 effort for the Network team was to implement a second data route for campus. Our primary internet source is routed from Atlanta, but if they experience an outage, then so do we. We now have a backup data route originating in Nashville. The Network team has tested the transition between the two sources at great length and is confident that we are far less likely to experience a major outage. In conjunction with creating a redundancy plan, this team also worked to double the standard bandwidth availability, taking it from 10 gigs to 20. As you can see in the graph above, some weekdays easily spike above 12 gigs of incoming data, so that has been a valuable asset to the campus.
In addition to that major project, the Network team supported an average of nearly 100,000 devices connected to the network, both wired and wirelessly. They improved network security to prevent unwanted devices from connecting to the network. They also updated how the network is distributed to improve connectivity throughout campus and added 430 new wireless access points as well.
Large-scale research is collaborative in nature, and not just between researchers at the same institution. In order to facilitate those efforts, and others, Auburn OIT made several communications improvements throughout 2019.
The telecommunications group started the labor intensive effort of upgrading the phone switches for 9,597 working telephone numbers across campus, and managed to get through 1,516 in 2019 with an eye toward converting the rest throughout 2020. They also installed internet-based phone functions to allow for better connectivity and business continuity across campus.
Several different groups, including the Microsoft Server Support team and the Identity and Access Management team, worked together to move all employee email accounts to the Cloud, providing more storage space, better availability, and simpler integration with other applications.
Several OIT teams work together to provide systems and software access to Central IT and 11 other departments.
The Digital Workspace team dedicated a portion of 2019 to the large undertaking of upgrading hundreds of servers from Windows 7 to Windows 10 in order to provide continued support. They accomplished that while still managing hundreds of desktops that were used nearly 135,000 times throughout the year as people logged in, used their unique virtual desktop, and logged back off.
During that same timeframe, the infrastructure and virtualization team was restructured to bring in the infrastructure that supports the Banner system used all across campus. This change added hundreds of servers and nearly 200 terabytes of storage into this group's management. They also dedicated a large portion to improving security on all servers to make sure campus data is kept safe and secure.
| 511 Supercomputer Researcher Accounts |
| 72% Avg. Supercomputer Utilization Rate |
| 1,516 Phone Numbers Converted to a New Telephone Switch |
| 262 New Cell Lines for Auburn Employees |
| 430 wireless access points added to campus |
| 530 old wireless access points replaced |
| 230 network switches added or replaced across campus |
| 74,000 devices, on average, connected to AU WiFi each week |
Last Updated: March 02, 2020
