Tech Briefings

Document Storage at Stanford

OS Build Systems

IT Services will present and answer questions about the Linux (Cobbler + mrepo for RHEL, and FAI for Debian) and Windows build systems that we currently use.  Additionally, there would be a round-table discussion about current and future OS build systems at the University.

Mobile Websites at Stanford:  A Mobile SIG Open Meeting

Featured Presenter: Brian Young (IT Services)

Description:
Stanford's Mobile SIG (Special Interest Group) meets occasionally to discuss current mobile web topics and share works in progress. This quarter, the Mobile SIG meeting is being upgraded to Tech Briefing status for a special presentation by Brian Young (IT Services) on the incorporation of Twitter's Bootstrap responsive UI framework into Stanford's official Drupal web themes. In addition, staff from the Lane Library will be on hand to present their new, dedicated mobile website that optimizes catalog searches and quick access to resources commonly used by Stanford's medical community.

Twitter's blog post announcing Bootstrap: http://dev.twitter.com/blog/bootstrap-twitter

Brian Young, IT Services

Anthony Christopher, Lane Library

Microsoft Presents

Come learn about the buzz behind Office 365, Microsoft’s hosted productivity solution that provides a unified workspace for you to communicate and collaborate, enabling you to do your best work without breaking a sweat!
 
In this session, we will demonstrate:
· Communication and Collaboration – an all in one unified workspace
· The new paradigm of productivity – working from/with multiple devices
· Advantages and benefits of an intelligent, cloud-based platform

Video Conferencing at Stanford

Please join us for an overview of IT Services newest service offering - video conferencing!

Video conferencing integrates audio, video, and interactive collaboration tools to create an immersive meeting experience. Globally dispersed meeting participants feel as if they're in the same room. 

IT Services staff will provide a demo,  discuss service features and functionality and the many ways  in which video conferencing is being used here on campus.

Distributed Computing - Folding@home, and Cloud Computing Demo

Join Professor Vijay S. Pande (Chemistry, and by courtesy, Structural Biology and Computer Science) as he details the general history and methodology behind the distributed computing model, how this is a paradigm shift from the mainframe/supercomputer model, and how the Folding@home project utilizes this novel technique.

Using the CPU power and communications abilities of unattended desktop computers throughout the world, the Folding@home project studies protein folding and misfolding. In this method of computer processing, known as distributed computing, different parts of a computer program run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.

By harnessing the power of many machines, researchers are able to analyze far more data than they might have been able to do so otherwise. Indeed, Folding@home was the first machine to pass the petaflop scale and is now is at almost 10 petaflops in performance. The Folding @ Home project runs on any modern computer, including Playstation 3s, and runs only when the computer is otherwise not being used.

There will also be a live demo of StarCluster, an open source cluster-computing toolkit for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You will also learn about cloud based applications available to the campus, such as Amazon and others. 

- Professor Vijay S. Pande, Chemistry (and by courtesy, Structural Biology and Computer Science)

- Alex Chekholko, IT Services

- Phil Reese, IT Services

FarmShare - Shared Computing Environment

FarmShare is Stanford's free shared research computing environment, available to anyone with a fully-sponsored SUNetID.

In this session, learn how to get started with FarmShare, see examples of the format, and learn about FarmShare
features, including how it:

- Supports different types of computing tasks
- Maintains locally installed software on each machine
- Provides a selection of software, including popular licensed applications
- Supports long-running, multi-day jobs, as well as parallel processing
(via MPI or OpenMP).
- Includes a resource management and scheduling system (Grid Engine)

More information at http://farmshare.stanford.edu

Document Storage at Stanford

It's easy to save a document to your hard drive and email it to everyone who needs it, but that's usually not the right solution.

Learn about online document storage solutions at Stanford including where you can store Restricted data and how to share your documents to some or to restrict access to others.

We'll look at the upcoming Docushare retirement and how to use WebAFS and SecureAFS, plus new solutions like Box.com and Google Drive.