#InsideIT

Have you ever wondered what makes your calls to our community call centers work? What technology makes the 959 or 910 numbers always available? We recently had the opportunity to gain some insight into the technology and challenges around the platform enabling our call centers, as we aimed to update the infrastructure to its latest version, packed with new capabilities to enhance your user experience.

Article written by: Luis Goiriz | September 11, 2022

The IT Department hosted its first in-person townhall since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost a whole year has passed since the last one hosted over Zoom. The event was a great opportunity for IT teams to showcase their great work, items in progress, and highlight new and exciting upcoming activities!

Article written by: Daniel Nader | November 16, 2021

Hybrid learning combines traditional face-to-face teaching with additional offline and online techniques, like experiential learning and digital course delivery for the ambitious students of today's generation. We met with Professor David Ketcheson, Associate Professor in Mathematics and Computational Science, to hear about his experience using these cutting-edge technologies in his classrooms for teaching.

IT Colleagues, In an effort to create a uniform look and feel for our internal and external communications, we have put together a guide for email signatures and a reminder to update our information on the KAUST Portal. This aims to encourage colleagues to create a homogenous experience for our customers when interacting with IT, in line with the CIO's Strategic Goal for IT Re-Branding & Outreach.

We wanted to take the chance to personally welcome each one of you back to the offices, catch-up with old friends, enjoy warm cups of coffee and treats, and to rekindle our team spirit and sense of belonging, which we have missed the most during the pandemic.

As part of the Digital Transformation Strategy, there was a major platform shift happening in our current Enterprise Data Warehouse Landscape during the period of March to June 2020. And right in between the project, we were hit by the Pandemic Lockdown. However, the entire project team mustered for the challenge and achieved the successful completion of the Project. The project was executed remotely with teams located in different countries, sharing great team spirit with a high sense of commitment to achieve our goals.

WhatsApp users were recently notified of the app’s data-sharing practices with Facebook, and many have begun to seek alternatives. This article gives you a summary of WhatsApp’s recent policy update and a reminder for you to be a Human Firewall.

We met recently with Prof. Magdalena (Magda) Julkowska, an Assistant Professor at Boyce Thompson Institute, former Research Scientist in Prof. Mark Tester’s Salt Lab in the BESE division here at KAUST. Prof. Magda reached out to IT Research Computing for guidance on creating a website that KAUST publishes but gets its contents from a GitHub repository.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | October 27, 2020

This article covers some of the most frequently asked questions about Microsoft Office 365’s sharing capabilities that are built into its OneDrive and SharePoint applications.

Everyone at KAUST has an Office365 account; this article focuses on highlighting the use-cases of our storage and document collaboration applications and their differences to help you select the right tool for your work needs. Article written by: Daniel Nader | October 20, 2020

BinderHub allows you to build and register a Docker image from a Git repository, then connect with JupyterHub, allowing you to create a public IP address that allows users to interact with the code and environment within a live JupyterHub instance. You can select a specific branch name, commit, or tag to serve.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | October 1, 2020

JupyterHub brings the power of notebooks to groups of users. It gives users access to computational environments and resources without burdening them with installation and maintenance tasks. Students, researchers, data scientists, and professors teaching classes can get their work done in their own workspaces on shared resources which IT Research Computing manages efficiently by running on its Kubernetes production cluster.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | September 17, 2020

Prof. Ibrahim's Hoteit's team generates petabytes of data running simulations on Shaheen. They need fast access to visualize the data for pre- and post-processing. That is where IT Research Computing's Remote Workstations come into the picture. We do not move the data, we just stream pixels. Article written by: Antonio Arena | September 6, 2020

KAUST IT is excited to offer free access to Gartner Core IT Research to the KAUST Community! Article written by: Daniel Nader | August 23, 2020

Arnaudd Hungler migrates more than 100 unmaintained virtual machines to Docker containers running on IT Research Computing's Kubernetes cluster. Efficiency at its best!

Article written by: Antonio Arena | July 26, 2020

IT Research Computing is proud to announce that their production Kubernetes cluster is readily available for use by the KAUST research community.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | July 20, 2020

The IT Department hosted its first ever virtual townhall over Zoom on July 6, 2020 with over 150 attendees!

Article written by: Daniel Nader | July 15, 2020

Dr. Amhed Vargas published his R based Shiny web site that models C. Elegans germline leveraging IT Research Computing GitOps knowledge and expertise.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | July 5, 2020

Docker Containers (Containers from now on) have taken the technology community by storm.

Article written by: Antonio Arena | July 1, 2020