We plan doing a test trial by adding screens containing room schedules to M001, M101, and M201. We’ve already installed an early prototype screen on M101. The concept is to show exactly when a conference room is in use so that it can also be used for quick ad-hoc meetings and studying without scheduling conflicts.

We spent a lot of time researching options. The Steelcase RoomWizard is the most popular commercial product. However, the product is fairly closed, so if we wanted to add any additional content, such as announcements, photos, or weather, we’d be out of luck. The real show stopper was the price. Each room wizard would cost over $2000 not including installation. This price just doesn’t scale if the trial were to prove successful and we chose to outfit more rooms.

We’ve decided to try building our own. We investigated low power technologies like e-ink, but at this time, these also seem to be too expensive. We are now working on an embedded Linux touchscreen. We’ll cover additional details once we make some more progress.

Prototype display shows scheduled events for M101

We’ve added two displays at reception. One display is designed to provide feedback about Thayer School’s energy use. Currently it displays our instantaneous electricity usage in Cummings and MacLean, and also displays how much electricity our solar panels are producing. The plan is to make this data easier to understand, and add a couple other bits of data, such as weather from our weather station and printer usage.

The second reception displays contains upcoming events from the Thayer Events Calendar. It also loops through a slideshow of Thayer photos.

If these displays prove successful we’d like to permanently install larger flat panels on the wall.

Two displays at reception show energy consumption, upcoming events, and photos

And finally, in the Great Hall we are finishing up the installation of two large flat panel screens. These will be used during events which are held in the Great Hall. In the past we’ve used a digital projector in this space. However, due to all the natural light in the room, the projection screen is extremely washed out. These screens will be much easier to see in bright daylight.

When they aren’t being used for presentations or other events, we plan on using them for informational displays. Like the displays at reception, they’ll contain events, announcements, photos, weather, and more.

two new flat panel displays to be used for events

If you have ideas or feedback about any of these new displays, please let us know.

Thayer School of Engineering Weather Station and Photovoltaic Array from Thayer School on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for future updates on viewing the data.

Email and collaboration tools

Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.

Hard drive based back up server

We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To reflect our paranoia of making sure all your ThayerFS data is safe, we’re adding another layer of redundancy to our data back up plan. We just started setting up a new “online backup server”. It consists of fifteen 1 Terabyte hard drives which we’ll use to back up ThayerFS. This system will eventually be located off-site. We’ll continue to use our tape library which will be located in yet another off-site location.

Weather station and Solar Panel monitoring

We’re in the middle of a project to get a weather station installed on the roof of Murdough. We’ll be using the same system to monitor the output of the Solar Panels which are already installed on the roof. The plan is to make the data available on the web for those interested in local conditions and for research purposes.

Spanos lighting improvements

We have been working with our building manager and FO&M to add special lights to properly illuminate presenters. This should improve the quality of our lecture capture video and should reduce the harsh shadows the current lighting causes on the speaker’s face.

A/V system improvements, documentation, and repairs

Collaborating with Instrument Room personnel, we have been working for some time now to make our classroom and meeting room audio visual systems more user-friendly. This includes simplification of touch screen controls or even their replacement with pushbutton controls, enhanced documentation about how to use the systems, improved image quality in Spanos and C200, a combination white board/projector screen in M210, additional microphone options, improved/repaired audio, etc. Some of these improvements are finished, but we still have a long way to go on others.

New Intel compiler available

We purchased two floating licenses of Intel Fortran and C++ compilers for Linux. They are available on any of our Linux clients or compute servers. Also included with these licenses are the MKL and IPP libraries.

For more information about these new compilers and how to use them, please see our Linux Services page.

New lab computers

In the next few months, we plan to deploy new lab computers for the Linux lab in Cummings and to replace the ten oldest computers in MacLean 210.

Adobe Contribute rollout soonish

We’ve purchased licenses of Adobe Contribute, which will allow the Thayer Community to create and edit web pages in a simple WYSIWYG editor. The experience is similar to a word processor. If you are interested in using this software, please contact us.

Vista planning

While we’re content with Windows XP, Windows Vista is an inevitability as XP support is dropped by Microsoft. We’re going to start looking at the best way to image and deploy Vista on lab, desktop, and laptop computers.

Blade servers

We recently took delivery of a new blade chassis and some new blade servers. The chassis can accommodate up to 16 servers. The preliminary plan is to replace our aging babylon compute cluster with a couple of blades. This will reduce space, electricity, cooling, and administration time, while increasing the computing power over our current cluster. We’ll have several empty slots available for faculty with research projects that need extra computer power.

Condor High Throughput Computing

We’re investigating the use of Condor High Throughput Computing on our linux clusters. This would allow the Thayer community to submit compute jobs and have them distributed automatically to our compute clusters.

Currently, we are testing this on our limited-access sisyphus cluster, but hope to roll it out to an upgraded babylon cluster after the Spring term. Jobs run on either cluster will be able to use the other cluster’s CPUs if they are available.

Hardy Heron is coming…

The new version of Ubuntu, version 8.04 (hardy heron), is scheduled to be released at the end of April. This new release features many enhancements to the version we’re currently running on our linux clients, and is also the next of Ubuntu’s “long-term release” versions, which will get security updates for a longer period of time than their other versions.

We have been alpha (and now beta) testing this to ensure that any bugs related to our systems are reported and corrected prior to its official release. We plan to upgrade the Cummings 227 linux lab with the new version (and new computers, too!) after the Spring term. We will also be in touch with faculty and staff who have linux clients to schedule their upgrades.

ThayerCups server upgrade

We just upgraded the CUPS print server that handles print jobs from Mac and Linux clients. There should not be any change in the way you print from these platforms.  The new server is now easier to back up.

Application Virtualization

We are testing, “Application Virtualization”, a new technique for encapsulating applications to ease deployment to lab computers and client computers.

Atrium Help Desk continues

We continue to hold our “Atrium Help Desk” from 3:00-4:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come by the atrium if you have any computing-related questions.

Enter the DecTOP. The DecTOP is relatively old technology, designed by AMD years ago, with a 366 MHz AMD Geode processor, 10 GB hard drive, and a whopping 128 MB of ram. This is not a machine you would like to run hefty computation on, but it is perfect for a print release station. The DecTOP is inexpensive (less than $100), and consumes just 8 Watts of electricity. For the print release stations, it runs a cut down version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. No longer is the print release station a poor use of a power-hungry, underutilized computer. It is now an appliance: a single purpose machine running on inexpensive, efficient hardware just powerful enough to get the job done well. Over the next few weeks, the current hardware at the print release stations will be replaced by DecTOPs. You can see these machines already in place in M210 and cg23 (the copy room).

With the eventual success of the test run, I have implemented hibernate and suspend programs in all of our windows labs: M210, the Cad Lab, the digital electronics lab (C221) and the analog electronics lab (C222). The newer Optiplex computers are being sent into hibernation, while the older Dimension computers are being sent into suspend. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

I’ve recently started looking at printer and copier use. I’ve only gathered preliminary data so far, but the hope is to some day have a web page with real time statistics.

For the preliminary data, I chose to look at printer use over the first 30 days of the Fall term (Sep. 24 to Oct. 24)

Nearly all print jobs at Thayer go through our print servers. Part of the path includes the software PaperCut. Among other things, PaperCut keeps track of how many prints each printer makes. I used PaperCut’s numbers for the number of prints made in Thayer. In the future, we’ll likely just request the number of printed pages directly from the printers using SNMP.

According to PaperCut, in the first 30 days of the Fall term, Thayer printed 129,118 pages. That accounts for about 258 reams of paper. Using a ruler, I found that each ream of paper is about 2.16″ inches high. That means, if you were to stack all 129,118 pages in one neat stack, it would be over 46 feet tall! To get a better sense of how much paper that is, to the right you can see a photo of our own 5′ 6″ Matt Dricker standing next to a 46 foot stack of paper. If the number 129,118 didn’t already seem like a lot, suddenly this graphic drives the point home… we do not living in a paperless office.

The above data also doesn’t include photocopiers. According to Ken Clifford, Manager, Copy & Mailing Services, Thayer use another 260 reams of paper per month for copiers. So double the height of the stack of paper in the image to the right, and you’ll get an approximation of how much paper is used each month at Thayer.

We hope that by sharing this information, and educating people about printing double-sided, or alternatives to printing altogether, the use of paper (and toner) will be reduced.