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- Athena Cluster Services Personnel who will install and maintain systems.
- Athena Consultants who will field questions.
- Academic Computing – will need service continuity, and input into long term direction.
- Users of Athena General Use Clusters.
- Users and maintainers of Private Athena Workstations.
- Athena Server Operations.
- MIT Training and Publications team, to assist with documentation.
- Users of Third party Software, and Alex Prengel who maintains the third party software.
Lead Users
Planned timeline
Mitigation of impact of delay from original August 2008 delivery.
With a best-efforts resourcing, an August 2008 roll-out proved unrealistic. That project plan also gave insufficient time for validation and refinement in collaboration with users. The revised timeline below addresses the following issues:
- Incoming students will want something like Debathena. What can we give them?
- Linux-based dialup will be in demand. How can this demand be met in advance of Athena 10?
Planned timeline
- DONE July 2007 to January 2008: Pre-planning, and crafting of baseline functional specification.
- Best efforts resourcing for project
- Athena use case analysis.
- Feature set determination.
- Evaluate candidate baseline Linux distribution – possible successor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
- DONE January 2008 Initiate collaboration with Debathena SIPB project.
- DONE January 2008 Shift from best-efforts to scheduled resourcing.
- DONE February 2008 Create necessary development infrastructure.
- January 2008 - August 2008 Develop Athena 10 functional deliverables.
- 15 August 2008 Athena 10 Preview suitable for experimentation with by incoming freshmen.
- August 2008 - November 2008 Development and refinement of new Athena installer and update system to enable Cluster deployment of Athena 10 modules as a complete turn-key system.
- January 2009 - May 2009 Testing and refinement to make sure Athena 10 meets or exceeds expectations of Athena 9 users.
- July 2009 Full roll out to Athena Clusters.
- August 2009 - October 2009 Follow-up, and confirmation that Athena 10 has successfully rolled out and replaces Athena 9.