* The "Intelligent Glue" (duct tape and baling wire) holding the Center Ecosystem together:
--> "I span", attending meetings with Students, Professors, Directors, Deans, CIOs, VPs,
State Legislators and vendors... I write proposals, I lecture, I give tours to faculty
new-hire candidates, artists, and high-school students, and I participate in strategic
and budget planning processes... I run jobs on our systems, as well as at the NMCAC,
and I constantly and closely monitor the performance of those system... I have (and
use) root privs on all the machinery in the Center, I am the only holder (and user)
of the passwords for the Liebert A/C units... and I know the route of just about every
water pipe, electrical conduit and air duct in our 36,000 square foot, 54 year-old Gallas
Cadillac Dealership building, including the old vacuum document-transfer system ...My
Ph.D. training is in elementary particle and nuclear physics: to know how things "work"
is to be able to create the processes by which we figure out how the next things work...
* Some of my favorite quotes: (more about my wacky ideas here)
. There is a special charm to the colossal, to which ordinary theories do not apply.
- Gustave Eiffel
. Innovation arises naturally when you remove nincompoops from the system.
- (me)
* DEPUTY DIRECTOR
. Stand-in or augment as needed for activities associated with the half-time
Faculty Director in most circumstances, political, etc... E.g.,
. Worked with the Associate Vice President / Senior Associate Dean
for Research of UNM's Health Sciences Center to identify faculty who
would sit on a committee to define a new user services hire.
. Addressed NM State Legislature's IT Oversight Committee, upon the
occasion of their holding two of their monthly meetings at the CHPC.
. In front of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, assisted in a demo of
the capabilities of the National Labmbda Rail (NLR) during a NM/NLR
kick-off press event, which took place in CHPC's "ARTS Lab Garage"
experimental studio space.
. Provide CHPC and/or ARTS Lab tours to visitors, politicians, professors,
postdocs, students at all levels (from graduate down to grade school),
etc. E.g., recently co-administered a tour (via translators) for a
visiting contingent of about 20 Chinese politicians, doctors, professors,
lawyers, students, etc.
. I sit on the UNM-wide IT Managers Council.
. I am acting sub for UNM Research Cabinet and IT Cabinet meetings.
. Manager of "resident research group" relations and service provision
--> Many services are common; e.g., backups, security.
. Center business administration systems support
--> CHPC Services:
. Desktop / server system admin
. Security services
. Printers, scanners, etc.
. Advanced Visualization Lab and collaborative resources
--> CHPC Services:
. Desktop / server system admin
. Two Access Grid-enabled meeting rooms
. Boston University-developed 'Deep Vision Display Wall' (DVD) system
. Special publ cvs archive
. Security services
. Brian Gaudet and Liz Ritchie (Computational Atmospherics)
--> CHPC Services:
. Advanced desktop and disk storage servers
. Vista system (an old SP3)
. Marc Ingber (Computational Fluid Dynamics)
--> CHPC Services:
. Ristra cluster
. Hammer cluster
. SRBCB (Shared Resource for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology)
--> CHPC Services:
. Delphi cluster
. Apollo cluster
. Related storage cluster
. Backup and archive
. CREATE (Center for Rapid Environmental Assessment and Terrain Evaluation)
--> Real-time satellite image processing and product delivery
--> CHPC Services:
. RioBravo cluster
. Related storage cluster
. High performance over campus network: from antennas on south campus to CHPC.
. ARTS Lab (ARTS = Arts Research Technology, and Science)
--> CHPC Services:
. The Bay B Buildout:
. New machine room machine room
. Black Box experimental studio
. Digital Dome Theater
. Yenta cluster
. Related storage cluster
. ULIT (University Libraries IT services) are housed in our building... I moved
them in here recently to strengthen what I believe to be an important strategic
IT partnership. They do a great deal of work in Redundant / Virtualized / High-
Reliability server systems. It is good to have their IT experts mingle in the
hallway with ours.
. User base growth, research/academic support:
. Recent new projects:
. New classes being taught with or through CHPC:
. Tom Hagstrom, Math
. Marc Ingber...
. Etsuko Nonaka (Biology), storing data at CHPC
. Enrique Farfan Torrez (Civil Engineering)
. Kristina Ciesielski (Psychology)
. Catherine Baudoin: UNM Maxwell Museum digital archive project
. Jack Ox: GridJam (performance art) project using National Lambda Rail
advanced services
. Etc. etc...
. My own research: LHC/ATLAS experiment, Southwest distributed Tier2 Center.
* PROGRAM OPERATIONS DIRECTOR
. Manager of Cluster and Research Systems Administration
--> NOTE -- we run our own internal IT shop: email and listservers (w/ good
spam suppression), web services (hosting, etc.), NIS(YP/LDAP), DNS, various
databases (including CPU and storage accounting), data backups and archiving,
video conferencing (Access Grid and other H.323), desktops, printers, scanners,
etc.
. Run the weekly 'Tekiss' meeting ("tech-issh" --> 'Technical Issues'; more
conventionally known as a 'Systems meeting')
. Manager of User Services
--> Meeting: Also the 'Tekiss', in this case for interaction between systems
and user services
. Oversaw recent new hire here
. Staff Performance evaluations, etc. (5.25 FTEs report directly to me.)
. Machine Room Operations
--> Three machine rooms, actually:
. An old/inadequate one
. A newer, small one
. The nice new big one (The "Performance Pit")
. Cooling (w/ Air Management Corp & UNM Physical Plant Department (PPD))
. Power (w/ PPD for UPS systems)
. Fire protection (w/ EMI Corp.)
. Security (w/ UNM Security Dept. & PPD)
! Machine deployment (integrating new computing systems into
all of the above support systems)
. Gallas building coordinator (since departure of Dina Chavez)
--> This is a 54-year-old former Cadillac Dealership: 36,000 square feet.
--> (Too!) many interacting systems in this old building; requires me to
"know everything" to control interactions.
* Technical roles:
. CTO (with some support from systems crew): keep abreast of technology
trends and options (this activity is enhanced by our interactions
with collgeues nation-wide via our participation in the LCI (see below.))
. See also 'Vendor liaison / relations', below.
. User services activies
. Xufei's problems
. MATLAB
. Benchmarking...
.
. Dynamics of Machine Room Operations
. The man with the Leibert passwords
. 'Telemetry' (monitoring / quality assurance) coordinator
--> I am often the only one who looks regularly at the status screens
. Allocation and scheduling liaison
--> E.g., "Yes, it's OK for this user to get another terabyte of quota"
--> E.g., "Dear user, here is why your jobs are not running..."
. (I am learning the details of the Maui scheduler within Torque.)
. Grid activities coordinator
--> Access Grid; Condor; Open Science Grid (UNM was 1st MSI deployment);
Teragrid (I am a member of the M- and L- Resource Allocation Committees)
. Grid co-system administrator
. Condor pools
. OSG gateway systems
--> LosLobos cluster presented to OSG as a resource
. I occasionally act as an AG operator
. Occasional system admin activities
. Monitoring
. Debugging
. Have all root passwords
. Advanced web co-design
. Azathoth: a research project, whose sub-title is "a parallel
operating system for human teams."
* Business roles
. Vendor liaison / relations
. IBM
. SGI
. Apple
. SUN
. DELL
. Penquin Computing
. Intel
. Terasoft
. Isilon
. Panasas
. A host of other, smaller and/or specialty firms
. Creative Consultants (Albuquerque)
. Large-Systems Procurement Officer
. Proposal co-crafter...
* Training coordinator; e.g...
. LCI Conference organizing committee
. LCI Workshop co-leader and lecturer
. Big Picture / economics of cluster procurement and management
. Intro to MPI
. Data Center Design
. CHPC training: organization and lectures...
. Intro to the CHPC
. Getting things done with Unix
. 'Intro to (parallel) Matlab' (Dave Braun, Purdue)
. 'Access Grid: introduction and administration' (CY Chan, CHPC)
* Promotion
. CHPC Quarterly Newsletter
. Attending various computing-related research talks, meetings, etc. campus-wide.
* Multi-disciplinary Outreach Activities
--> Admittedly, some of this is self-serving...
. Research Faculty in Department of Physics and Astronomy
. Vice President of UNM Chapter, Sigma Xi Scientific and Engineering Research Society
. Liaison to UNM ITS (Info. Technology Services) and UNM Telecomm
. Liaison to UNM North Campus (Health Sciences / Medical School / Hospital)
* MSI outreach activities
. (UNM is one of only a very few Universities that are simultaneously
'Carnegie R1' (old designation for Research Extensive), MSI (HSI), and EPSCOR.)
. I'm becoming further involved with Teragrid and OSG activities
. Working with our neighbors at Navajo Technical College in CrownPoint
.
.