Our Unix Engineering team is dedicated to being your collaborative partner in the conceptual planning, design, implementation and long-term management of computing technology that enables and fosters computational research.

Research computing in SCS encompasses a number of different applications and services. We maintain a custom managed environment for linux desktop computing, which provides for elevated privileges, custom repositories and a kerberized authentication method. We currently offer Ubuntu Linux (see our OS lifecycle page page for OS support timelines) as our principal offering on desktops (although we may run and maintain other distributions for clusters or special applications). 

We provide different types of support and consulting for Linux project servers. These are considered independent Linux workloads (workstations or stand-alone servers) that are generally independently managed, but for which we can offer machine room hosting with network provisioning and power management (UPS) along with basic 24/7 operational monitoring.

We design, deploy and maintain high performance clusters (HPC) for different research groups within SCS. While we do not perform application support, our Linux engineers can assist with general OS-level consulting and support, purchasing consultations, technical hardware guidance and work in partnership with research groups for on-going needs assessments as requirements and usage grow.

We also offer backup services such as data protection for desktops, archival backups for some desktops or project servers and archival backups or ZFS with snapshots for HPC.

Our system engineers are a resource to research group, providing guidance as new requirements emerge and providing insight into long-term, scalable solutions that can meet that challenge. Please submit a request to consult on general guidance, technical consulting and more.