Alex going to host next meeting

Clusters

•  doing overnight cluster cleaning
• Taking pictures
• A couple rooms have gotten new carpets
• Of 3 sunblade holders, 1 keeping, 1 on fence, 1 unreachable
• Jon Reed is writing up instructions for users to upgrade to DebAthena (goal is start of term)
  

Oliver - recap of Wilson, Survey and 2010 goals

• http://ist.mit.edu/getting_started/faculty - not very Faculty specific - we should improve that
• Wilson very interested in Wikis (look at Physics Text Book wiki)
  • should be able to tell faculty that folks thought about using wikis as a text book
  • We have a collection of interesting wikis to get folks thinking
  • Maintaining the wikis for others would be resource intensive
  • Jim answers a lot of how to questions, not create the spaces for people (still labor intensive)

• Metrics are big deal - especially challenging for our group because none of traditional standing metrics moved into this group
  • Still useful to identify things we can't measure today but would be helpful to in the future
  • As well as things we do measure, but don't report out

• Everything should be worthy of MIT
• Confused about where Wilson sees our team involved in new technologies
  • We should put together a general case for testing/experimenting with new technologies E.g.,
    • Will involve X professors
    • Run for no longer than Y days
    • Will shutdown if funding not available

• What kind of services are our faculty getting through our core services (Help Desk, Hardware Services)? - faculty member after hours grant proposal problem, shouldn't he get some help.  How many questions are we getting through help desk, hardware services from faculty members.  What can we infer what they wish they had.
• Work that hasn't changed in a long time that has been going on for years and years - not in a positive tone
  • Athena - if it is valuable to the community, we need to articulate that value and what it is worth to the Institute with data
    • How it is being used?
    • What is it being used to do? Doing research, reading email, etc.?
    • Who is using it?
    • Why is it worth the money we are spending on it?

• • Benefits Athena is providing now:
    • Offers huge collection of software (commercial and opensource)
    • Provides whole bunch of scientific applications
    • File Storage (AFS) - group lockers, fine control ACLs, web access
    • Publishing website
    • Machines available across campus
    • Chat communications
    • (need to divide frontend and backend)
    • Check back into Faces of Athena document - Oliver to post to our Wiki
    • (also need to say why Athena is the best way to provide these)
    • Interesting thought exercise - what if Athena stopped being here tomorrow (no AFS, no clusters)
    • Three things emerged from searching OCW for Athena references:
      1. Easy environment to document what to do
      2. Required piece of software
      3. Shared workspace

• • • Guesstimate is fewer than 10% of course

• Goals 2010
  • Any questions about overall CSS goals?
  • Everyone should make own list (2 or 3) of individual goals over 3-6 months (send to Oliver - brainstorming team level at next meeting)
  • Figure out best way to come up with in between goals that sit between them (i.e. team goals)

• Survey Piece
  • Learning how folks are using Athena clusters - several ways to do that
  • Need to come up a list of questions that are useful to ask - create wiki page for that to collect questions
  • Survey should be quick

• Ranjani (demo) using virtual and real world
  • In the FSX wiki
  • Travel profiles for different countries
  • Use India page to capture structure to build out the template
  • Have article for each country in Hermes and link to map from FSX page
  • Ranjani and Tommy to work together to add data to the Athena cluster markers on new MIT google map

• Jon Hunt shared some stuff about VMware User Group