The Martinos Center IT support group consists of three full-time system staff specializing in Linux administration with some individual expertise in Windows and OSX administration and web and database programming. The Center has over 600 faculty, staff, postdocs and students.  A large part of our user base come from outside the official Martinos Center department. These groups include Neurology, Amnesia, MIT BCS, Harvard Psychology and many others.

The largest part of our work is desktop support.  At user's desks on site there are over 250 Linux workstation, 100 Windows desktops and 50 Macs that we maintain. We assists users with purchasing the correct equipment, installation of operating systems and specialized software, backup and troubleshooting. Also we assist users with complying with Partners IT policies such as laptop encryption.

The IT group maintains over 30 central Linux servers.  These are located either in a makeshift server room on the 1st floor of CNY149 and at MGH's enterprise data center located in Needham. The major purpose of these servers is for data storage but all other major services of any large IT operation are also run such as web, mail, and databases. The one big exception is core networking (e.g DNS) which is handled by Partners IT.

The center has two batch computing clusters at the moment.  One is an extremely old one that we hope to soon retire consisting of 120 dual Opteron nodes along with a scattering of older dual 32-bit Xeon and P4 nodes.  This is located in the makeshift server room in CNY149.  All nodes come from a San Diego outfit called Verari (formerly RackSaver). The job queuing software used is OpenPBS.