Publications

It has been recognized that documentation for new customers of ASCI Red, aka janus or the Intel Teraflops at Sandia National Laboratories, has been sadly lacking. This document has been prepared by a team of subject matter experts to fill that void and to provide a starting point for providing a similar document for ASCI Red Storm in the future. This document is intended for SNL users who need to jumpstart their use of Janus and Janus-s.

In October 2000, the personnel responsible for administration of the corporate computers managed by the Scientific Computing Department assembled to reengineer the process of creating and deleting users' computer accounts. Using the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for quality improvement process, the team performed the reengineering by way of process modeling, defining and measuring the maturity of the processes, per SEI and CMM practices. The computers residing in the classified environment are bound by security requirements of the Secure Classified Network (SCN) Security Plan. These security requirements delimited the scope of the project, specifically mandating validation of all user accounts on the central corporate computer systems. System administrators, in addition to their assigned responsibilities, were spending valuable hours performing the additional tacit responsibility of tracking user accountability for user-generated data. For example, in cases where the data originator was no longer an employee, the administrators were forced to spend considerable time and effort determining the appropriate management personnel to assume ownership or disposition of the former owner's data files. In order to prevent this sort of problem from occurring and to have a defined procedure in the event of an anomaly, the computer account management procedure was thoroughly reengineered, as detailed in this document. An automated procedure is now in place that is initiated and supplied data by central corporate processes certifying the integrity, timeliness and authentication of account holders and their management. Automated scripts identify when an account is about to expire, to preempt the problem of data becoming ''orphaned'' without a responsible ''owner'' on the system. The automated account-management procedure currently operates on and provides a standard process for all of the computers maintained by the Scientific Computing Department.