Dear Users

As you are aware YNiC has been closed for the last fortnight as we upgraded and replaced much of our IT infrastructure.

Whereas previous changes have hopefully been relatively transparent, the replacement of the open plan analysis workstations is not something you'll be likely to miss. We're confident that the new systems will allow a greater flexibility in the neuroimaging analysis you do, but if you have any problems finding your way round the new machines there are some pointers on the docwiki to get you started. The page can be found at:

https://www.ynic.york.ac.uk/doc/ITPages/TransitionDocumentation

Whilst we think the changeover has gone pretty smoothly, there are still one or two jobs we need to finish off before YNiC is back in full operating mode. These mainly concern internal procedures but we are also rigorously testing as many stages of the analysis pipeline as possible.

The new machines and software offer very many new opportunities. This is exciting but also means that even more testing of software is required before we are confident of making the new tools fully available. Some of you will be consulted in the process of this testing as your experience, skills and datasets are likely to help perform tests.

You will already see that a much wider range of applications is now available as we have moved to using Linux as the operating system. The main effort over the last few months has been to ensure that all the standard previous applications are available to Users. The next steps will be to provide new facilities that have been on the wish-list.

We are currently working to increase the available amount of disk space, which is getting rather low. Some of you may get an email over the next day or two about archiving some of your data. We really need your help as disc space is becoming quite a problem. We now store some 9.5Terabytes of user data. The main projects quite correctly use the 'scratch' space for results. Usage is currently at a level of 3.9Terabytes or 98% of the available space! We are having to take urgent action to free up space as otherwise no one will be able to carry out any analyses. In fact until we do this we cannot support beamforming or FSL, so we are working on this as a matter of urgency.

As part of this process some files are being converted to a format which will take up much less space, and to do this we are using the cluster, so for the time being it is unavailable for either MRI or MEG job submission. We will announce when the cluster is available again for general use.

Further emails will follow to keep you informed on progress.

I would like to publicly thank the YNiC staff for the extra effort that has gone into making the IT upgrade a success. Particular thanks must go to Mark Hymers and Sam Johnson for the remarkable amount of time and effort that they have put into making the IT changeover possible.

Gary Green Director