Summary Status
Originally targeted roll-out of August 2008 will be delayed until January 2008.
Infrastructure milestone has been met.
Significant progress on the next milestone, Core.
See Also the Athena 10 Technical Plan: Milestones
Project Goals
- Inventory Athena use cases.
- Identify obsolete functionality and retire it.
- Maintain or improve service levels for the non-obsolete functionality.
- Migrate more functionality off of MIT-maintained code.
- Redo MIT-maintained functionality to reduce its size and maintenance cost.
- Adopt a base operating system in closer alignment with current practice in the MIT Linux community. (Ubuntu replaces Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL))
- Adopt applications and services in closer alignment with current practice in the MIT Linux community. (Applications, Services, and Device drivers of Ubuntu are more modern than what is in RHEL.
- Improve security.
- Modularize functionality to allow installation on top of pre-installed OS.
- New: Form a collaboration with the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) to leverage their modular DebAthena work, and to build a unified product going forward.
The Athena 10 Technical Plan contains the use case analysis of the Red Hat 4-based Athena version 9.4, the mapping of that functionality onto the Ubuntu base operating system, and the current status of the development work to produce the Athena 10 deliverables.
Deliverables
- Software packages
- Athena original software
- Configurators for native or imported third party packages.
- Self maintenace
- Source repositories for software for which MIT is the upstream maintainer.
- An automated update from Athena 9.4.
- An installation system.
- Release notes and documentation, particularly for aspects of Athena 9.4 which become desupported or supported in different ways.
These deliverables are further detailed in the Athena 10 Technical Plan: Deliverables
Roll-out Plan
To be refined.
Stakeholders
- 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
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.