Involved people at OAB: Delpino, Di Luca, Gatti, Lolli, Madama, Merighi,
Montegriffo, Policastro.
During 1999 the hardware update of the computer center was continued. The number of Alpha workstations, replacing the old Digital DECstation, was increased together with the number of PCs used as a front-end of more powerful servers, instead of dated X-terminals or as stand-alone workstations for data reduction under Linux OS.
Given the always increasing dimension of astronomical images, several workstations were upgraded both in physical memory and disk space in order to improve their performances.
The increase in the number of workstations has decreased the amount of users per workstation, but has raised the work-load of the computer center staff. For this reason, a series of lessons on the basics of System Management were organized, in order to allow a group of users to help the staff to solve the simpler management problems.
Furthermore, a new server, especially configured in memory and disk space for dealing with the huge amount of data expected from the new national and international telescopes (ESO-VLT, TNG), has been installed. Also a Sun Ultra 5 workstation has been bought and made available. It will be primarily used to run the ESO P2PP procedure and secondly to run software compatible with this architecture only. The actual list of workstations is the following:
Two VAX/VMS hosts (ASTBO3 e ASTBO4) are still in activity, being used as central units.
The first is mainly used by the personnel of O.A.B. and Astronomy Department. The second one by the students.
The number of PCs used as Unix-Linux workstations increased during 1999 reaching the number of 15 units, plus 10 PCs running Win98.