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May/June Newsletter (plus any months missed in between)

by Stacey, Craig

Hi, everyone!  It’s been too long!  Or maybe not long enough, depending on how you feel about these things.  In any case, let’s proceed with all the exciting news from CELS Systems.

In this newsletter we’ll cover a few topics, notably:

  • New members of CELS Systems
  • New members of CELS for the summer (aka, Welcome Summer Students and Visitors!)
  • Changes in the computing environment you should be aware of.
    • Including Improv!

New CELS Systems hires

I’d like to welcome a couple of new team members to the CELS family.

  • Joe Bezouska started with us in early May as one of our new Systems Administrators supporting a number of our bioinformatics programs.  Prior to joining us, he’s spent a number of years doing linux administration for many organizations including Molex, Oracle Textura, OfficeMax, and Tribune Company.  He’ll be focused on such projects as KBase and SEED support, but will also be contributing to other projects our team works on.
  • Dwayne Roberts started with us at the end of May, and is our new InfoSec Lead for CELS.  Dwayne’s going to be taking the lead on the Cybersecurity and Information Security duties in CELS.  There are a lot of initiatives in the pipeline from Washington, and Dwayne’s going to help us all make sense of it and work with you to make sure we’re keeping things secure in the way we need to, but with as little impact on the research as we can.  Prior to joining Argonne, Dwayne has spent time with Postal.io, GCM Grosvenor, Tribune Publishing, and the US Air Force. He also spent time instructing Cybersecurity at Northwestern.

We’re delighted to have Joe and Dwayne join us, and look forward to many years together working to keep CELS computing as great as we can make it!

Welcome students!

Man, this is a great time of the year to be in building 240. The whole building is alive with energy as we’ve got a fresh wave of students joining us for a summer of interaction, learning, and hopefully a bit of fun.  Here’s a couple of get-to-know-CELS tips from me to all of you!

  • Your host/mentor/sponsor is the most intimate with the work you’re going to be working on.  They’ll know the best computers you should be using, any special idiosyncrasies you should be aware of, and what tools and packages you might need that are not part of the standard install.  Work with them, ask them questions.
  • If you’ve got a linux workstation sitting on your desk, please understand this is a unix computer in a shared computing environment.  Which means you can’t have root/sudo on it.  And if your first question is why not, that’s a big part of the answer.  The short version is we can’t give you the ability to become any user on a shared computer network.  We’ve got a team of people who are supporting this environment and are trying to make it as universally useful as we can.  If the only reason you need sudo is to install a particular software package, just send us a note to [email protected] or reach out in #cels-systems-helpdesk on Slack and we’ll get it installed for you and everyone else..

Just a reminder we don’t really staff a physical help desk location, so reaching out via email is best, or Slack if it’s more urgent than that. Also, here’s a link to our freshly updated FAQ!  https://help.cels.anl.gov/docs/getting-started-with-cels-computing/frequently-asked-questions-faq/

Upcoming changes in CELS Computing

We continue our march to retire Legacy, and at this point we are unable to create new accounts in the environment.  The account management system is very broken, and we’re in the process of helping individuals and projects who have not migrated yet move off the system.  If any unix/linux system you’re logging into is using an account that’s not your ANL account, it’s probably a Legacy system.  If you have people needing to access Legacy data but they do not have existing Legacy accounts, please have them reach out to us at [email protected] so we can provide an alternative.

Improv is here! (kinda)

The racks of computers that will become Improv landed in our data center last week.  We’ve still got weeks (months, actually) of work to do before it’s going to be ready for general use in LCRC, but this is all very exciting for us.  LCRC will send out a big announcement when it’s officially here, but I’m just so glad it’s finally in the door and being built.

That pretty much wraps up the extremely pertinent things we’re spending effort on.  I hope you’re having a fabulous late spring/early summer!  As always, reach out to [email protected] for any questions, and thanks!