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

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.

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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.

Social Media

Things like Twitter, facebook, etc. and how they are being used by students, faculty and administrators was another thread going throughout the event.  With there being a streaming feed of the #educause09 tweets in EDUCAUSE Central and the online participants, it was definitely interesting to watch how this evolved.

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.

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