WindowsNT at DESY Building a Modern Infrastructure for Heterogenuous Computing Demands

Paper: 451
Session: G (talk)
Speaker: Poser, Till, DESY, Hamburg
Keywords: commodity computing, configuration management, off-the-shelf products, PC operating systems, system management



WindowsNT at DESY
Building a Modern Infrastructure for Heterogenuous Computing Demands

Volker Heynen, Axel Knabbe, Martin Koehler, Wolfgang Krechlok, Till Poser
Deutsches Elektronensynchrotron, Hamburg, Germany
The DESY WindowsNT Project Group

Abstract

The furious increase of computing demands for future experiments can
only be reasonably obtained by using commodity computing hardware
and software on a large scale. At the same time the individual
computing and support demands of the users grow more and more
diverse.

The DESY WindowsNT Project Group is creating an infrastructure to
meet both the legitimate heterogenuous demands of the user
communities and the pressure to reduce the administration and
maintainance overhead. For this purpose it uses state-of-the-art
off-the-shelf commercial software products to avoid the innovation
drag imposed by homegrown maintainance software systems.

The DESYNT maintainance and software distribution mechanism will be
based on MS Backoffice products such as SMS, and commercially
available products, such as Polycenter Assetworks, WinInstall and
MS ResourceKit.

By the time of the conference, the infrastructure is expected to
serve >200 WindowsNT Workstations with >400 users.

The work is ongoing.