Page History

November 3-6, 2009 in Denver, CO

The conference kicked off with a great opening keynote by Jim Collins talking about Leadership in High Ed IT.  Here were my based on his research in comparing the Good to the Great.  Here are my take aways from the keynote:

...

•  Build personal board of directors of people with character
• Get young people in your face
• Turn off electronic gadgets and put white space on your calendar for disciplined thought
• What is your question to statement ratio?  Double it in the next year.
• Start a "Stop do list"
• Suspend titles and articulate responsibilities
• Discover the below water line risks and take them away
  

From the

...

Sessions 

There were several themes that emerged from the sessions I attended as well as the sessions that were being offered.  I group them as follows:

• Cloud Computing (Private and Public)
• High Performance Computing (Research Computing)
• Virtualization
• Sustainable IT
• Financial Constraints

Cloud Computing

I attended numerous sessions that address all of these in various overlapping ways.  Of particular note was the growing number of schools providing students and researchers with access to there own internal cloud computing environment on an On Demand basis.  The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) project out of NC State, which Pat Dreher (former MITer) presented about, was particularly exciting.  They hace created a open source project that provides an internal cloud to students and researcher that can be leveraged to load balance with unused cycles for HPC isntallations as well.  I think there is a lot of potential in this area to consider what MIT should be looking at in terms of service to students and researchers.  We have been leveraging Amazon services for a while through various grants, but those resources will start to cost more eventually.  The VCL provides a web frontend that enables its users to request an n-node cluster of machines and chose which image of operating system and applications should be installed.  They then use that for the requested timeframe and then it is returned to the pool.  Financial comparisons of this done in Virginia show the VCL configuration to be much more cost effective than other options they considered.

High Performance Computing (HPC) 

There is a growing demand for HPC across all of the universities.  Some are meeting this need through central IT resources, many have local DLCs running their own HPCC, and others are outsourcing things.  I think the right solution is a balance of offerings and enabling the faculty and researchers to select the appropriate resource for the job at hand.  Everyone sees the energy consumption by research computing as driving the IT power load for the next decade and will put IT on the map in terms of overall university carbon emission sources.  Numerous solutions are being looked at to address this and many more will need to be considered and implemented.

Virtualization

Virtualization, both server side and desktop side is growing.  Many schools have virtualized significant portions of their data centers to consolidate hardware, save on space and save energy.  A number of schools have deployed Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDI) and are using that to keep management costs in check and enable better performance without needing bleeding edge desktop (laptop) hardware.  VMware just released their latest series of products in the VDI space with VUE 4 and it included the enhanced PC over IP protocol that can enable high resolution video and audio in a VDI environment.  I witnessed a VMware demo of an 720p action video being run on a standard laptop using VDI.  Also, included is the disconnected operations which is in "experimental release" which is post beta but not fully supported by VMware yet.

Sustainable IT

Even in the opening speeches Sustainable IT was mentioned as a critical function of IT going forward.  There were numerous sessions on climate change, sustainable IT, green in terms of $ and environmental impact.  Some of the best successes appear to be coming out of Stanford and we'll be working with Joyce Dickerson, Director of Sustainable IT at Stanford, in the coming weeks to share our approaches and figure out ways to do things better.  Let me know if you want to talk more about sustainable IT or climate change.

Financial Constraint

The reality of the economy was evident in the sessions.  Most sessions included mention of financial constraints and needing to show measurable and capturable savings as a way to fund projects going forward.

Conculsions

The event was useful.  I was able to catch up with Greg Anderson, Vijay Kumar and Wes Esser at various events.  If you are attending something at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, the Crowne Plaza was a nice distance (under 2 blocks) from the Convention Center and a good value.  The Hyatt was closer, but more expensive if I recall correctly.  Also, there is the Super Shuttle that runs from the airport to the various hotels that was a nice way to get to the city from the airport (which is about 40 minutes away).  There is a local run shuttle service, but I couldn't find sufficient information on that to make it worth trying.

I have more detailed notes from some of the sessions and should be able to access slides for other sessions.  I think the team will have access to the audio from the recorded presentations through the Online registration FSX did.

Thanks,

Jon.To be continued...