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 David Siegel was appointed as the Director of ICESS in July, 2002. Thirty independent research groups conduct and administer their research using the facilities and resources of ICESS. ICESS partially supports four administrative employees and 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:

     53 UNIX systems

     26 Macs

    129 PCs

    3 Linux clusters

All computers are connected to a common wired and wireless high-speed switched data network. Ethernet, Fast-Ethernet, and Gigabit-Ethernet, and Wi-Fi are supported. ICESS has a 1000Mb/s connection to the UCSB campus backbone which provides shared access to a 622Mb/s CALREN-2 connection, which in turn provides access to Internet2. The computing environment is based on a network of HP Compaq Digital (Alpha), Sun Microsystems (SPARC and x86), and Linux-based (x86) servers and workstations.  The main ICESS Linux Cluster consists of 22 AMD 2800+ MP CPUs, 22GB of RAM and 2TB of dedicated, high-speed disk space.  The cluster is architected with the flexibility to add more resources quickly and easily should participants' needs change.

Wintel systems predominate on desktops. The total hard disk storage at ICESS is presently in excess of 43TB. High-performance Fiber Channel and SCSI disk arrays allow participants to add disk storage to the environment in disk-sized discrete increments. Nightly backups to an off-site archive via a tape robot and hard disk arrays minimize the risk of critical data loss. Tape archival software eases the task of moving data sets to and from secondary (hard disk) and tertiary (tape cartridge) storage. There are eight networked printers including two color laser printers and a 36" color ink-jet plotter. Finally, a full compliment of computational, image processing, statistical, database, graphical, scientific visualization, and animation software are available for use in ICESS.

ICESS computing facilities benefit faculty and researchers housed in Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Computer Science, the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, Earth Science, Geography, and Marine Science, along with off-campus users located in Berkeley, Brazil, Canada, Chili, Colorado, France, Hawaii, Korea, Maine, Mammoth, Maryland, New Mexico, Oregon, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Scotland, Taiwan, Thailand, Three Rivers, Utah, Virginia, Washington, DC, and Yucca, California.

In addition we offer the following services:

Resource Center for SPOT Imagery

In June of 2005, a new program was launched to allow UCSB faculty, researchers, and students unlimited access to high spatial resolution commercial satellite imagery from the SPOT constellation of satellite sensors. These data are commercial products and have previously been inaccessible to academic researchers due to their high cost.  In December of 2006, ICESS and our corporate partner, Terra Image, USA, reached a major milestone with the official launch of the SPOT at UCSB program, http://www.spot.ucsb.edu. This program allows researchers at any subscribing educational institution in the United States the ability to purchase archive SPOT satellite imagery of North America (Canada and most of the contiguous United States) and the ability to task the series of satellites for their specific research areas, at discounts approaching 90% off the retail price.  We have begun ongoing satellite tasking of areas of scientific interest and impact, such as the LTER sites, in our effort to provide the unique benefits of this program to the academic research community at large   To date, we have archived over 76,400 scenes, occupying over 16 Terabytes, with a retail value of over $230-million.  UCSB researchers participating in our internal  program have utilized over 160 satellite images (both archive and newly tasked) over the last year.

AVHRR Receiver Facility

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.

Optical Calibration Facility

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.

 

Return to Contents Page