Re: The Superhighway Steamroller (Corrections)

Eric Katz (ekatz@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Mon, 27 Jun 94 08:15:39 CDT


Dr. Hart,

I am the Information Server Administrator at NCSA and as such have configured
and maintained the NCSA WWW server since it's inception. I would request
that you correct the following information that you have published in
`The Superhighway Steamroller'

1) NCSA has never used any of it's SuperComputers as any sort of information
server. This simply was not necessary. We are currently using
Round-Robin DNS to rotate through four Hewlett-Packard 735's on an FDDI ring.
This is necessary because we are handling in excess of 1.7 million
connections per week. I will not attempt to justify our allocation of
resources at this time but it is important that you correct the fact that we
have not dedicated a Cray for this purpose.

2) NCSA does still maintain a 3 shift Operations Staff which provides 24 hour/
7 day a week coverage on all of the supercomputers, our HTTP server, and our
gopher server. I am in the process of upgrading our FTP server and
will be including it in the 24/7 coverage.

I would be very happy to answer any questions you may have regarding
Information Servers at NCSA prior to future publications.

I trust you will disseminate these corrections as widely as the original
article. I am respecting your explicit copyright in not distributing the
corrections myself.

======================================
Eric Katz
NCSA Information Server Administrator
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(217) 244-4211