ICESS FACILITIES

The Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS) is located on campus at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) on the 6th floor of Ellison Hall. ICESS is an organized research unit, a department-level entity dedicated to supporting extramurally-funded research. Professor Catherine Gautier is the Director of ICESS. Sixteen independent research groups conduct and administer their research using the facilities and resources of ICESS. ICESS supports four administrative employees and partially supports three computer system administrators, all from university resources. Several conference rooms are available for group meetings and a limited amount of laboratory facilities are available. Many ICESS investigators use laboratory facilities provided by their home academic departments.

The ICESS computational facility is in common with other features of the unit, a unique, shared, community resource, allowing interdisciplinary and collaborative research and training to flourish. The open nature of the shared computational resources is unprecedented in U.S. research groups. Most importantly, the community computer resource enables students and faculty researchers to share not only hardware and software resources but also the data sets and specialized computer programs that are the core of the individual research projects. This sharing of intellectual achievements enables ICESS researchers to make new and important Earth system science and integrated assessment discoveries, in turn to share their results quickly with the wider community, and provides a truly interdisciplinary environment to train students. ICESS supports a total of:

62 UNIX systems

11 X terminals

13 Mac's

60 PC's.

All computers are connected to a common high-speed switched Ethernet, Fast-Ethernet, and FDDI network. There is a connection to the Internet (10Mb/s) via the UCSB FDDI backbone (100Mb/s). The computing environment is based on a network of primarily DEC and Sun workstations (Digital Alphas, Digital MIPS, Sun SPARC). Wintel systems running NT play an increasingly significant role on the desktop. The total hard disk storage at ICESS is presently in excess of 500 GB. Nightly backups via a tape robot minimize the risk of critical data loss. There are 10 networked printers including a color laser printer. Much of the hardware has been provided by the Digital Equipment Corporation-funded Sequoia 2000 project. Finally, a full compliment of computational, image processing, statistical, database, graphical, scientific visualization, and animation software are available for use in ICESS.

The recently awarded NASA Centers of Excellence grant will: 1) make Fast-Ethernet available to most systems; 2) add the infrastructure needed to allow expansion of available hard disk space to 1.5TB; 3) appropriately scale the required backup server infrastructure; and 4) add a computational task scheduler which is able to utilize both compute servers and desktop resources.

In early 1999, we expect to receive a new 100Mb/s connection to the UCSB campus backbone that will allow shared access to a 622Mb/s CALREN-2 connection, which will in turn permit access to the National Science Foundation's vBNS (very high performance Backbone Network Service).

ICESS computing facilities benefit researchers housed in Biology, Marine Science, the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and Geography, along with off-campus users located in Goleta, San Diego, Mammoth, Wilson, Wyoming, Three Rivers, Colorado, Michigan, and Palmer, Antarctica.

In addition we offer the following other services:

ICESS maintains a Terascan receiver and data archive at UCSB. Data is collected daily from overhead satellite passes, contains raw satellite pass data dating from September, 1993, to the present and is an important source of current and historical remote sensor observations of the west coast of the United States.

ICESS is a participant in the Bausch & Lomb UV Monitoring Network, the largest UV monitoring network in the country, with UV sensors to continuously monitor incident UVB, UVA and PAR. While these instruments are primarily used to support the Ray-Ban UV Index reported by weather stations around the country, the research quality data are readily available to interested investigators and are actively being used for the long-term monitoring of stratospheric ozone concentrations over the United States.

Since 1978, in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service and the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, we have operated a snow research station on Mammoth Mountain on the eastern slope of the south central Sierra Nevada. The instrument site is an open, high-altitude (2930 m) area characterized by high winds and dry snow typical of much of the alpine region of the Sierra Nevada. The site is equipped with basic meteorological instruments, radiometers, a snow pillow, and snow lysimeters, all automatically controlled from an on-site computer facility. Year-round access to the instrument site is provided by the ski area's gondola and lift system, while automobile access is available during the summer. The Mammoth site gives us the unique ability to measure a complete surface energy budget from the beginning of the snow accumulation season until the end of the snow melt season.

Optical signals--whether obtained at ocean depths, in glacier ice, on the Earth's surface, from the atmosphere, or in space--are a key component of our scientific observations. We have developed a number of unique optical instruments (e.g., in-water UV and visible spectroradiometers) for our various research efforts. Sensitive calibration of these optical sensors is essential to ensure high quality and reliable data and we have developed a state-of-the-art optical calibration facility.

This submersible Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is used in conjunction with our Profiling Ultra-Violet radiometer (PUV) and our Light and Ultra-Violet Spectral Sensor (LUVSS). The purpose of the ROV is to move the radiometers out of "ship shadow" prior to a profile. The ROV has been used in the California bight as part of the BURNM (Biological Effects of UV Radiation on the Natural Mortality of anchovy larvae) project as well as in the Antarctic as part of the ICECOLORS project. In addition to avoidance of ship shadow, the ROV has allowed us to pilot our radiometers under ice flows in the Antarctic, providing us with a rich new data set of UV transmittance through ice.

An ISDN link over the local telephone network provides 128 kilobits per second of bandwidth between the OPL, located in Goleta, and the main ICESS FDDI network. Two Ascend Pipeline 50 ISDN-to-Ethernet bridges provide bandwidth upon demand between the two sites. At the OPL, a high-speed Ethernet switch connects 8 workgroup computers to the site's server, a Sun Ultra 1 model 170E with 128MB of main memory and 26GB of disk storage.