Hardware & Software Configuration

DICE is comprised of representative technologies found in a production data center and is isolated in a development environment composed of secure compute, networking and storage technologies. The environment utilizes the wide area network as well as other network connectivity already existing at participating sites.

Each site location consists of equipment and software that mirrors data center environments and typically include the following components:

• Compute cluster  
• Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and data archive
• High performance storage
• Project servers
• Support  servers for domain name services (DNS), Mail, network time protocol (NTP) and  Gateway
• Batch scheduler
• Compiler libraries
• Two-factor authentication to maintain a secure environment for testing and users

Because DICE connects to non-DoD systems, only publicly releasable data is used. This data is representative of the current research activities occurring at the different agencies. This allows projects to evaluate various security policies and approaches.