During the past year, the School of Civil Engineering has purchased two new servers. One of the systems replaced the aging departmental server while the second system upgraded the computational server. Both servers were purchased with funding from the Instructional Computer Initiative.

The primary server, bridge.ecn, was upgraded last fall from a 6 year old Sun Enterprise 450 to a new SunFire V440. The new server has four 1.6Ghz UltraSPARC III processors and 16GB of system memory. Also, a new storage system with a capacity of 1.5 terabytes (TB) was installed. The new v440 server is around 7 times faster then the E450 that it replaced. And, the amount of storage space was tripled. The additional disk space provided enough resources to double everyone's disk quota.

The new server will continue to provide the same services as the old equipment. It is the primary departmental server and provides file, print, and email services for the school.

Also, this past summer, the computational server, pyramid.ecn, was replaced with a new SunFire V40z running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 operating systems. This new server was named interstate.ecn and has four AMD Opteron 870 dual core processors and 16GB of system memory. The server is intended to be used by graduate students for large computational research jobs. In Civil Engineering, the Abaqus program is the source of many large finite element analysis jobs.

At this time all faculty and graduate student in Civil Engineering have access to interstate. Due to its shared nature, we ask that only one large job be run at a time on the computational server, interstate.ecn.