The Computing Unit of the Institute of Cellular Physiology is in charge of maintaining and promoting the development of the computing and systems infrastructure in the Institute, supporting the research and teaching activities that take place in it.

The great development, as well as the preeminent role that this area has gained in recent years in all the activities related to the academic life, has resulted in a notorious increase in the demand of both technical and specialized services, which has determined the diversification of functions among the personnel that works in the unit, in two sections:

• Section of maintenance and technical support
• Section of systems administration and applications development.

Section of Maintenance and Technical Support

This section takes charge of giving technical support to all the computing equipment of the Institute, as well as giving advice to the users in the use, installation and acquisition of programs. Maintenance labors are given to more than 600 computers in both, hardware and software related problems, as well as printers, scanners, switches and other peripherals.

The staff of this section attends all the service requests from the users, maintaining all the equipment of the Institute operating in a satisfactory way, with minimal need of external service or repair. They also provide advice to the users on the management and installation of programs and interfaces to computers and give support to the public use rooms, which are equipped with computers, scanners, printers and DVD burners.

Another task of the technical support staff is to monitor and repair both, the wired and the wireless network in both buildings of the Institute, detecting connectivity problems as well as wire and network card anomalies that may result in network dysfunction.

Section of Systems Administration and Applications Development

This section takes charge of all the tasks related to the installation monitoring and administration of the 12 network servers, development of utilities for the administering tasks and network usage, designing and programming of the web pages, and development of programs and databases in support of the administrative and academic activities of the Institute.

All the servers run under Linux and all applications and network services are either open source programs or systems and databases developed ad-hoc by the computing unit staff always using open source tools.

Several tools have been developed to facilitate the servers and network administration tasks, as well as graphical interfaces, which facilitate the access to the network services to the users. Many databases have been developed and maintained to help in administrative tasks and store and facilitate the use of academic information.

The project Hermes (Hypertext Environment for journal Retrieval from Many Electronic Sources) represents an integrated solution to the problem of recovery of bibliographical information of databases and scientific magazines available through the Internet. This project was developed with the collaboration of Shirley Ainsworth, librarian of Biotechnology Institute of the UNAM and was an interesting experiment of interdisciplinary work and collaboration among institutes.

The project GENARISE is a system, developed at the unit, for the analysis of DNA microarrays´ data.

The personnel of the Computer Unit of the Institute of Cellular Physiology have consolidated as a very solid team, which has worked in a coordinated way for several years now. We have made an effort to improve the quality and quantity of services to all the users of the Institute, trying to promote the better use of all the services and take the best advantage of the infrastructure.

Computing Unit Personnel:

Technical Support and Maintenance:

• Juan Manuel Barbosa Castillo: jbarbosa@ifc.unam.mx
• Ivette Rosas Arciniega: irosas@ifc.unam.mx

Phone: (52-55) 56225598

• Francisco Pérez Eugenio: fperez@ifc.unam.mx
• Juan Héctor Hernández: juanhdz@ifc.unam.mx

Phone: (52-55) 56225730

 

Systems Administration and Applications Development:

• Gerardo Coello Coutiño: gcoello@ifc.unam.mx
• Sergio Rojas Hernández: srojas@ifc.unam.mx

Phone: (52-55) 56225599

• Ana María Escalante Gonzalbo: aescalan@ifc.unam.mx

Phone: (52-55) 56225730