Information Technology Group

Mission Statement-

“Our mission is to provide information solutions, enabling students, staff and faculty at IUB Chemistry to effectively meet their goals in a world-class learning and research community.”

Information Technology Group (ITG) is just one of our eight technical services in Chemistry, but it is unique in that it serves and assists the whole of Chemistry - faculty, staff, and students - in their academic, administrative, and research-based computing activities.  The resources, services, and capabilities that ITG provides to support the Department's needs are beyond reproach and are unrivaled anywhere in the university system.

Currently there are 1525 devices assigned on the network. This includes printers, Apple systems, Windows workstations/servers, UNIX servers, HPC clusters, climate control/monitoring systems, STC labs, acquisition and instrumentation systems. All 1525 appliances must exist on the network safe and secure with each other and outside of IUB network systems. ITG is responsible for monitoring, security, and maintaining the extensive network, workstations, servers, applications, instrument control, data acquisition, and web resources that are required by all laboratories and offices in Chemistry as they connect to the university system and commodity internet.  Limited staff resources and overlapping of key positions continue to be an enormous challenge with only six appointed staff. Our new faculty members continue to drive ITG to provide unrivaled support, services, and resources to ensure delivery of Chemistry's academic and research mission.

ITG serves as the technical leader in the development of the Chemistry Department's Computer Assisted Learning Method (CALM) .  CALM is a distant outreach learning tool designed to provide students with enhanced problem-solving skills through directed inquiry. Based upon a Socratic pedagogy, it presents students with individualized, algorithmically-generated questions on a given topic.  ITG's leadership involves providing design, instruction, and development as well as overseeing staff and budgetary issues.  Funding has been acquired through strong departmental and University support as well as direct lobbying at Indiana State House and Hoosier for Higher Education Sessions.  This lobbying has resulted in financial and administrative support from the Indiana Department of Education.  Currently CALM supports approximately sixteen active Indiana University COAS Courses (3200+ students), Morehead State University , University of Rochester , California State University , and Jamestown College . Outreach to high school chemistry programs primarily in Indiana has been emphasized; 3000+ Indiana High School students now use CALM. Through the support of Indiana University , the College of Art and Science, and the Indiana Department of Education, CALM is now taking a significant role in assisting both teachers in aligning their instruction and students in achieving mastery of Indiana 's Academic Standards. 

High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster design and deployment for currently 272 CPU's inside Chemistry is an area of support that ITG provides for three professors (Clemmer, Raghavachari, and Iyengar) to deliver their in-house HPC needs. These needs must be met internally because university resources do not support the resources needed such as operating system, storage capacity, and processors required. Our National Center for Glycomics and Glycoproteomics will have a 24 CPU/20 Mascot cluster in Chemistry in September of 2006. HPC has taken a significant commitment of ITG's resources, which will increase in the future.

ITG supports specialized clusters of Intel/Windows and Macintosh systems.  These systems include not only the extensive software available to students in the public clusters, but specialized Chemistry software as well   Also, supported on both the Apple and Intel systems is a Shared Resources Center with peripherals such as scanners, printers, wide bed plotters, laminators, film recorders, and a projector.  Support is provided for routine and publication quality color printing on several different media and platforms.  Large format output is provided as well. These resources are used by other departments such as Biology, Math, Life Science, and Physics.   

IT services are provided from 10/100 MBit for workstations and GigaBit over copper for servers throughout the Chemistry building to mobile computing 802.11b/g wireless deployed and accessible from everywhere in Chemistry for student and faculty laptops. All of these forms of media connection provide services such as MASCOT searchable database for Life Science support, acquisition control of NSCL DAQ using Red Hat LINUX, Virtual Instrument (VI) support with LabView in the Freshman Labs for our 3000 undergraduate students as well as research labs, point of sales with Cougar Mountain supporting Chemistry Storeroom, and data backups using BackupExec for our production servers or a 4way-dual copy to the HPSS and the “Data Capacitor” for 10Gig (YES Gig) single data acquisition data sets, to offering financial and tech support for Chemdraw 10 Ultra to all of IUB. These are just a few of the custom-supported needs of Chemistry's ITG.

The Chemistry Building is connected to the campus computing network infrastructure using Ethernet data communications equipment and fiber optic cabling (1000Base LX). 1525 network appliances in the department take advantage of these UITS-supplied resources.  Off-campus access is also supported via a pool of 1725 UITS-supported high-speed V.90 modems. ITG also supports faculty and staff home high speed networking that allows members of the department to work securely from home. 

ITG maintains sixteen departmental servers that provide web servers, SQL database management, point of sales, application/database serving, file serving, backups, domain/email administration, and print serving to the department.  The group supports a server running Norton Antivirus Enterprise Edition that monitors 375 workstations out of the 656 workstations inside Chemistry's Organizational Unit (OU) that is inside the ADS. Computers can connect to this server and receive automatic virus definition updates and scheduled scans. Chemistry has many systems that cannot utilize this form of enterprise management software due to the instrumentation control and data acquisition that are their primary function; these systems are managed locally.

ITG's web page (http://itg.chem.indiana.edu/) is available to assist users with computing problems and provides information useful to research group system administrators within the department, as well as staff, faculty, and students.