Chandra hardware and systems: keeping things running

摘要

System management for any organization can be a challenge, but satellite projects present their own issues. I will be presenting the network and system architecture chosen to support the scientists in the Chandra X-ray Center. My group provides the infrastructure for science data processing, mission planning, user support, and archive support and software development. Our challenge is to create a stable environment with enough flexibility to roll with the changes during the mission. I'll discuss system and network choices, web service, backups, security and systems monitoring. Also, how to build infrastructure that's flexible, how to support a large group of scientists with a relatively small staff, what challenges we faced (anticipated and unanticipated) and what lessons we learned over the past 6 years since the launch of Chandra. Finally I'll outline our plans for the future including Beowulf cluster support, an improved helpdesk system, and methods for dealing with the explosive amount of data that needs to be managed.