Director's Take
by Dave Hull

Welcome and welcome back, depending on who you are. Over the summer, we’ve made a few changes. For starters, you’ve probably noticed that you no longer login into the SAUD domain to get into computers in the labs. Our thinking was that by switching users from the SAUD Domain to the Home Domain, we would have fewer accounts to maintain and could free up some time for other support issues. However, the switch has not been without some problems, so we have not seen the expected gains from this move. If you’re experiencing problems logging in or accessing your data, please stop by and let us know.

We have also upgraded and added some equipment. We have four new digital cameras and two new laptops available for checkout. The new laptops are much more capable than our older models. You should be able to run applications from the AutoDesk and Adobe Creative Suites on these two new machines. We hope to order more of these and have more of them available for checkout in the future. We have also purchased another 10 card readers. If you check one of these out, please return it. Last year we lost all of them.

In the coming weeks, we are expecting the arrival of two new HP 5500ps DesignJet plotters. We are sending one of our HP 800ps DesignJets to the Kansas City Design Center program so we will actually only be gaining a total of one plotter, but the 5500 seems to be preferred by the students. This additional plotter will give us more capacity to handle the load of high volume plotting during midterms and finals. It’s going to require some rearranging in the room where the lab monitor works, so please pardon our mess. We’ll try and keep it to a minimum.

Another big change is the purchase of a 30 node high performance computing cluster to be used for rendering 3D models and any other Architecture and Urban Planning related software that can take advantage of distributed computing. A few years ago, Henry Troyer began taking older computers that were no longer under warranty and putting them into the “rendering farm” which was used by 3D Studio Max for the creation of 3D models. The rendering farm lived here in the building in a space that was not intended to handle the heat produced by these 40 computers.

We made arrangements with KU’s Information Services to move the rendering farm to the Computing Services Facility, but they would not take our 40 desktop systems. So we worked out some exceptional pricing with Dell and were able to put together a new cluster with 30 brand new rack mounted systems. The cluster is not up and running yet, but should be up in the next few weeks, once we’re over the initial start of the semester workload.