Research Facilities and Labs

research

 

High Performance Compute (HPC) servers
The Geosciences department has at its disposal a large amount of compute power in ways of

  1. Six Beowulf Clusters
    • A combined total of close to 400 nodes and 400 GB of memory, Xeon 1.8 - 3 GHZ processors, Dual Core AMD Opteron 880 processors.
    • Specs of each node
      • Supermicro Motherboards
      • Xeon 1.8 - 2.8 GHz processors, AMD Opteron 880 Processor
      • 2 GB ECC memory
      • Broadcom or Intel Gigabit Controller
      • 3com/Trendnet/SMC Gigabit Switches
  2. About 60 TeraBytes of high speed SCSI storage systems
  3. Several mid-range V880 sun servers
    • 8-12 processors, ultrasparc III, 750 - 1200 MHZ, more than 16 GB of memory
  4. Access to the campus HPCC (http://www.hpcc.uh.edu external)
  5. Access to TLC2 computing facilities (http://tlc2.uh.edu external)
server 

server

sun AMD wsm

PC workstations - Software & Hardware
The PCs are equipped with a variety of software, below is a list (not meant to be comprehensive), please login to any PC and to view an updated list.

  1. Acrobat-7 (reader and writer)
  2. ArcGIS-9_2 (GIS software)
  3. ArcInfo Work Station 9_2 (GIS Software)
  4. Basinmod (Geological Modeling Software)
  5. Canvas-10 (Illustration Software)
  6. Coreldraw-11 (Illustration Software)
  7. DeltaGraph (Graphing)
  8. Endnote-5 (Bibliography software)
  9. Envi-4_3 (Remote Sensing)
  10. Illustrator-CS2 (Illustration Software)
  11. Kaleidagraph-3_5 (Graphing)
  12. Nero (CD Writing Software)
  13. Neuralog (Well Log Data analysis software)
  14. Office-2003 (Productivity software)
  15. Photoshop-CS2 (Image Editing)
  16. SMT_8 (Seismic & Geological Interpretation software).
  17. Thinanywhere (Remote access software)
  18. Secure Shell (Secure access software to the UNIX workstations)
  19. Quicktime & Windows Media Players
  20. Mcafee Anti Virus software
  21. Matlab2006

The PCs are kept up-to-date with the applicable software patches etc on a regular basis. All the systems are Pentium IV class systems with a minimum of 512 MB of memory and a high end video card. All of them have a CD-WRITER and most have DVD-WRITERS and Zip Drives. Most PCs have USB and firewire slots in the front/back.

SUN Workstations - Software & hardware
The following software is available on the SUNS. (Not meant to be comprehensive)

  1. Acrobat4
  2. EarthWave-1.2_Solaris (Seismic Modeling and Imaging Software)
  3. GDCMOD
  4. GMT (GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets)
  5. Matlab5.3
  6. SU (Seismic UNIX, From Colorado school of Mines)
  7. Seplib6.1.1 (SepLib Library, From Stanford)
  8. Solid
  9. Geoframe 4.0.4
  10. Focus 5.1 and 5.2
  11. VoxelGeo
  12. Geodepth
  13. StartiMagic
  14. GmSYS
  15. Larson (Plotin Software)
  16. GCC and SUN'S C and FORTRAN Compilers
  17. Hampson and Russell Software

The SUNS are SUN Blade 100s. All of them expect 2 have dual graphic cards and they are 3D capable cards.


Sun Lab
PC/SUN Lab in room 230

Multimedia Lab in Room 230 - printing (color and b/w) plotting and scanning tools
Note: Detailed plotting / printing / scanning help is available at http://support.geosc.uh.edu

Rooms 230 and 232 are connected so gaining access to 232 will provide you access to the multimedia room in 230. This room consists of several PCs, some sun workstations and variety of plotting/scanning/printing tools. For your Black and White printing needs there is a Xerox N2125 printer, for your plotting and color printing needs we have a HP 1055CM 36 inch wide plotter and HP Color Printer (both the plotter and printer are connected locally to a single workstation and thus can only be accessed from this workstation).

Additionally, this room also contains several scanners and one system at the far end (look around) for doing OCR (Optical Scanning Recognition, image to text conversion). Simple instructions on using these scanners are posted on the scanners themselves. You can also use the Department Copier (on the third floor) to scan images which will not get deducted from your copier account (instructions are posted above the copier)

This room also contains several Tape drives for doing data dumps and backups of large volume of data. DLT, Exabyte and DDS tape drives.


lab
Multimedia Room, Room 232

Additionally there are several other Geosciences Computer Labs which are not directly managed by Geosciences IT but are available for use by the staff/students with appropriate permission. Some of the these labs are

  1. Geosciences Learning Center
  2. Remote Sensing Labexternal

Note: IT Resources at the Geosciences Departmentexternal. This site is kept updated and you will find answers to most of your common problems at this site. Also help on using most of the resources listed here is available in the form of Documentation / FAQ at the support siteexternal.